Is social audio already dead? | Hacker News Reader

Is social audio already dead?

thehustle.co

128 pointsthm182 comments

I got an invite when it started blowing up and gave it an honest try.

Virtually every room I joined was filled with self-described "thought leaders" and influencers promoting themselves to each other, and the conversations were comically similar:

- Start off by validating what a great community this is and how great and positive everyone is.

- Story time: either a huge challenge they overcame to become the great success they are today, or trying to make the most basic common sense sound like some insightful breakthrough.

- Repeat a few times, and then someone will "reset the room" and start over again.

I couldn't help but laugh because I honestly couldn't believe it wasn't a parody.

This tangentially reminds me of a shameless puff piece on one of the financial networks about a startup lead by a "self-made man" who invested part of his trust fund into his business and whose father, worth over $250M at the time, was a major investor.

The few rooms I found on Clubhouse that were interesting had a theme of reading bedtime/sleep stories.

Which is essentially a live podcast to put you to sleep

I would expect to get trolled in rooms like that; it just sounds too contrived to not be a troll. Calm gentle voice interrupted by loud screams just as you were about to fall asleep, things like that.

Agreed. Best case experiences were in rooms that felt like mid-tier tech conference panels.

Clubhouse could've leaned into the above idea and really figured it out. Like, how do you mix the experience of a live in-person panel of experts and also leverage asynchrony across space and time... Maybe there would've been something there. But as it stood, it felt like it hit the jackpot with a clever idea and a bunch of hype but never actually solved any of the hard problems that might turn it into something real.

Sounds like a low-rent TED Talk.

This sounds like an audio version of LinkedIn.

LinkedIn kind of creeps me out because it is the only social network I actively participate in as my authentic self. (Because I make games, I have to go on all kinds of things in test accounts) When people I know make an announcement and I see it I feel like I don't want to be supportive. And it is useful to know where people are working that you haven't seen for a while. But to post an article? I don't know.

This, so much this!!!

> Virtually every room I joined was filled with self-described "thought leaders" and influencers promoting themselves

Talk is cheap. That's why this model doesn't work.

Text is cheaper, yet Twitter.

Text is cheap to scale on Twitter, which is why it succeeded. Your message can be read and understood in a matter of seconds. That's much faster than listening to and processing an audio clip.

Text tweets have infinite reach with enough retweets. It can be embedded on websites, drawing a new audience that doesn't spend time on Twitter. It doesn't disappear if you weren't there right when the tweet was being posted.

Audio has none of these things. Nobody wants to watch a recorded stream, the whole appeal is that you are LIVE with everyone at the same time.

It blew up mid-pandemic when tech/VC people were mostly trapped at home with little social to do, but drink delivered cocktails on Zoom.

It also coincided a huge increase in bit/altcoin prices, which made pump/dump schemes profitable (especially early NFT). Politics also bloomed in Sept-Dec 2020 when BLM wanted somewhere to motivate as did those across the spectrum of "suppressed voices" after Jan 6.

Yeah, pretty boring.

https://www.boldspace.com/news/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of...

This is the impression I got as well, and I didn't even have to use the app. I got the sense that all anyone cared about was growing their Clubhouse community, rather than using it because they liked it.

It's hard to quantify or put your finger on it, but there was all this "hustle culture" around Clubhouse. Everyone talked about how great it was and how it was going to transform social media. But it was clear in that few believed it and just wanted to be the first to pitch their tent on new plot social media.

As a result Clubhouse had a certain "emptyness" to it. Everyone was talking about how great it was and how great it was going to be, but there wasn't any actual content, just people repeating that message over and over again, or adjacent "hustle culture" topics like Stocks, Crypto, GaryVee Worship, etc. Since people in this space are very vocal online, you got the impression right off the bat that Clubhouse was skyrocketing in popularity, but it ended up being that you just had a small group of people in an echo chamber.

In some ways I think this “meta” conversation style is part of the early stage of nearly every social network. Especially the ones that are public messaging by default (as opposed to something like FB or IG which was in theory at least, friends and family first). Twitter was a lot of talking about Twitter. Mastodon was and sometimes still is the same. Reddit had lots of meta chats.

Even the early stages of fb had discussion of how it compared to hi5 or whatever network we migrated from. Same with google plus.

I think one mark of success of the network is the moment it escapes that conversation. In my opinion it means that the usage of the network is no longer a novelty and is now part of a routine.

Someone should make a platform like this that somehow de-incentivizes influencer culture. I want to see regular people having conversations, not trying to build a following. It's a poison that has snuck into essentially every social media platform.

Join the Fediverse. Most people there have no interest in mainstream culture and none of the software is built in a way to gamify engagement.

I keep thinking of putting together a bridge between twitter and my mastodon server, but I am always postponing it because it feels wrong.

But that's an artifact of the groups of people that self-select onto that platform, not a property of the platform or its incentives itself. If it became as popular as other platforms it would attract people with similar goals as are on other platforms. The technology isn't intentionally designed to reward them, but they will still find rewards and pursue them if it is their best option.

Not necessarily.

Mastodon, Pleroma and Pixelfed intentionally lack features that would be geared for influencers. Mastodon has no "quote tweet" to avoid having people taking conversations out of context. Pixelfed even has admin-controlled options to disable "likes" and display of counts altogether.

The clients, having no "algorithm" beyond basic chronological sort, make it hard for influencers to game the system. And it wouldn't be too difficult to have an instance where users have limited follower counts to keep the conversation more personal.

Chronological order makes it incredibly easy for "influencers" to game the system. Just post a lot. The system that's hardest to game is the one with the most reliance on algorithms, TikTok. On TikTok, you don't go viral because of some mechanical effect where >1/n people retweet you to their n-sized audience or anything like that, you go viral because the algorithm showed your video to random people and enough of them liked it that the algorithm realized your video is the one that some particular subgroup is most likely to enjoy. (Sorry for the run-on sentence.)

On TikTok you don't have to post every day to "grow an audience", you have to post literally one good video, and if it's really good, it'll get 200k likes by the next morning even if it's the first thing you've ever posted. I think that also leads to a reduction in "hustle culture" – if you post something on YouTube most likely no one will ever see it no matter how great it is. But if you post something on TikTok and it's good, people will see it, and so that obviously creates a much stronger motivation to produce rather than to consume.

> if you post something on TikTok and it's good, people will see it, and so that obviously creates a much stronger motivation to produce rather than to consume.

You took one part of my comment and missed all the other, more important parts where we were discussing about a platform people can have "closer" conversations.

My whole argument about the Fediverse is that (most) people are not looking for extrinsic motivation to produce. I've seen very little people worrying about "going viral" and like I said the systems are mostly designed to discourage these things. Having someone "posting a lot" will quickly be seen as a nuisance and people will stop following them, or get outright blocked.

> But that's an artifact of the groups of people that self-select onto that platform, not a property of the platform or its incentives itself.

the Fediverse is _incredibly_ heterogeneous. pick any two distant corners of it and often they'll be completely unaware that the other corner even exists. the platform allows for different cultures like this and the tooling is such that i _think_ this will remain true as it grows (admins can and do "defederate" with communities whose presence makes the experience worse for them, and as sibling points out there's far less algorithmic-driven content).

so i'm receptive to the idea that a long-term fix for influencer culture -- for those who want to avoid it -- really can be found there, simply because it allows for so much self-sorting. influencer culture might very well still exist, but just like every other culture on the platform it'll be concentrated only to specific corners of the Fediverse.

It's not audio, but the Fediverse gives me that as an alternative to influencer centric networks (in particular twitter).

As an alternative to instagram, there is Pixelfed, which integrates with all the other servers such as Mastodon or Pleroma.

it's called a dinner party. you essentially can't have this "at scale" without creating the incentives leading to the contentification of it.

Any idea how does that work in practice? Seems to me like an unresolvable problem, granted I haven't given it much thought.

If users are identifyable, cross-platform self-promotion is inevitable, it's kind of human nature. If users are anon, content is not curatable and quality is unlikely.

I think Twitter Spaces is pretty decent FWIW. Communities already exist around certain topics, there's plenty of subcultures on Twitter. And the platform is already reputation-centric, you can make of it what you will by following appropriate people. So if a reputable person organizes (and curates speakers in) a Space for a given topic, it can make for decent conversations to tune it. Seems kind of as good as anon voice-chatrooms can get.

I think that platform is called "the rest of the human experience outside of the Internet".

Invite some friends over, hang out at a park, go to a bar, throw a party, attend church, join a club, play a sport.

It seems interesting if it's possible to do those things "offline" without them getting taken over by "hustle", but not online.

Like, at a bar, club, or sporting event in "real life", you might occasionally run into a finbro trying to talk to you about crypto, but it's not the dominant experience.

But is there no way to do the equivalent things online (and there's no obvious reason there shouldn't be an online equivalent to a party or club or even sports league) without it being taken over by people who are there only to build their hustle?

It's definitely possible to find the same thing online. Most of the online spaces I hang out in aren't like that: here, the various subreddits I joined, my fairly carefully culled Twitter feed, etc.

The reason it's so prevalent online is because those people are gaming the system to appear prevalent. They talk up themselves and their brand/product to get likes, follows, and "engagement", which the social media algorithms use to rank and display content.

"Real life" doesn't have an algorithm that is so easily gamed, but there are still ways to "game" it. Going to popular locations (e.g. bars), looking presentable/knowledgeable, social engineering, buying advertisements, setting up seminars, etc. But in real life a lot of these are much easier to avoid because there's simply so much more to life that drowns them out. Real life doesn't have a front page that tells you what the most popular person said today -- that is the function of social media (or newspapers).

Of course, social media platforms could be built that don't prioritize content this way, either by using more complicated algorithms that are less easily gameified, or simpler algorithms that cannot be gamified (e.g. simple chronological ranking), or letting the user have more control over the ranking algorithm. But there is currently no simple market incentive for doing so.

That said, I could totally see that shifting even in the coming decade. I think people are getting tired of being advertised to, and transparently being treated as second-class citizen on these platforms. I could see a "premium" alternative to Facebook/Twitter becoming popular, with a small monthly subscription fee in exchange for much more user control and user-centric design.

Of course, more user control means more opportunities for filter bubbles and cultural fragmentation, which as we've seen are pretty bad for democracy. I suppose there is no easy solution to anything.

Have you ever played online team games? I've played both offline and online games quite a lot and at least here in Sweden I feel it's quite similar.

Sure there is. There are probably millions of Discord servers used by small groups of people for a common purpose. Same thing with Mastodon instances and subreddits. You don't hear about them because they're not trying to take over the world or build some huge platform. They're just groups of people that want to hang out with each other.

Internet itself isn't the problem. You could organize all of those IRL get-togethers using email. Influencer culture isn't a problem that effects email. Similarly, you can use discord, zoom, skype, IRC, SMS... all of these are broadly free of influencer culture.

Influencer culture is something that emerges on a particular sort of internet communication; mostly on the commercial platforms that specialize in asymmetric communication (where a few people produce and the majority consume.) To keep the consuming majority engaged, these platforms constantly recommend they follow the producing minority. Influencer culture is an inevitable consequence of this dynamic.

Good observation!

I suspect that we ourselves are partially to blame here.

Influencer culture isn't a problem on email, IRC, etc. because when we use those we expect ourselves to be active participants. We take for granted that we have to show up and provide something of interest to the others in the forum.

But when we go on Twitter, YouTube, etc. we expect to just mindlessly consume content without giving anything back. That creates an attentional vacuum where everyone wants to consume and no one wants to produce. Influencers fill that vacuum because no one else does.

In other words, email is like a potluck dinner and we would feel rude walking in without a dish. Other asymmetric social media is like a free picnic where everyone shows up empty handed and ends up eating from the giant tub of fries that McDonald's brought as a marketing campaign because, well, what else is there?

So maybe the trick is to avoid communities that you don't contribute to.

I certainly agree with that, but also, isn't this the sort of communication that the Internet was built for? What if you live in the middle of nowhere and you want to chat with someone about something none of your neighbors are into? I feel like 20 years ago the Internet was great at this in text form.

I feel like discord is pretty good at this.

One thing I remember was that discoverability was really difficult in Clubhouse. You could pick as many interests as you like, but it seemed like the feed would still spam you with a lot of stuff disconnected from your interests. When you found a good room, there was no way of following it for the next time it was open. Once it closed down, it was gone.

It's a shame, because there were some very interesting rooms with good conversations. It's just that it became a chore to have to sift through all the garbage to find them.

For everyone saying "why not just go out in real life?", that's not really an option if I'm cleaning the house for an hour, while clubhouse is. Also, some of those conversations (biologists discussing trends in the field with other biologists) aren't ones that are easy to just call up a few of your buddies to get.

How about a service I can pay for that blocks/mutes for me anyone that’s ever had a Clubhouse account, on all platforms?

I'd pay for that.

Online mediums that do one-on-one conversations (instant messaging, etc) or small group chats of people who know each other don't have this issue, but they're also pretty limiting for meeting new people. It seems like there's a trade-off between a platform making it easy to discover new people versus a platform fostering conversations between invested people participating equally. The largest social platforms have been the ones that are better on the discover-new-people side while doing worse on the other side.

I am building a platform like this. Also, you could try out Lunchclub.

Same. I left thinking that the concept was cool, but the problem they had was discoverability. Bad actors were taking advantage of the system and pushing down good content. It was cool for the first 3 weeks when the content was amazing, and I felt like I was able to passively listen to fantastic content while working. Afterwards, it just became too much of a hassle to swift through everything in order to find the content I found interesting, so I left.

Clubhouse etc has made me even more suspicious of anyone who uses the term "thought leader" in any serious capacity

It’s a good filter for me to single out narcissists.

Everyone wants to be a cult leader

Same experience here. I've had the lingering suspicion that live audio is too real and that it makes the lack of authenticity and narcissism of social media influencing too obvious. Maybe someone should try 15 second sound bites that are scripted, rehearsed, edited, and mixed with music.

I tried to have fun with Twitter's Periscope a year ago, which has been out for a while. It's a group video chat app where anyone can pop in. In that way it's sort of like clubhouse, but with video. When I would get on, it was 80% people sitting around talking to their friends, often in thick accents about nothing of particular interest (e.g people I don't know, things the chat participants experienced together that I have insufficient context to understand). That's probably 95% of the internet voice and video chats and I'm just not aware of it because I'm not randomly dropping in on people's conversations like you're allowed to do on periscope. Anyway, it's not the most easily monetizable thing, I'd imagine.

On Telegram voice chat, there's always some jerk or lunatic who talks over everyone who the rest of the chat participants have to tell to shut up. I think this is just a telegram problem because clubhouse has better moderation features.

Anyway, if you have a group of people you know and want to talk why not use Zoom? It's a better experience in every way. What's the benefit of letting random people drop in? Maybe with very clever moderation features it could work, but as is it seems kind of pointless.

> Anyway, if you have a group of people you know and want to talk why not use Zoom?

Because they're a terrible company who has repeatedly demonstrated that they're at best shockingly incompetent at protecting your data or at worst maliciously allowing it to be leaked and collected by 3rd parties.

Still, there are a lot of non-zoom options for video chat that would be a better experience so your overall point still stands, but it's still just weird to see anyone ask "why not use Zoom?" when by this time you'd expect to hear "Why would anyone still use Zoom?"

So... LinkedIn in audio format?

Sounds like a waking nightmare.

> Story time: either a huge challenge they overcame to become the great success they are today, or trying to make the most basic common sense sound like some insightful breakthrough.

Just sounds like LinkedIn. But I always see this kind of garbage on places that aren't pseudonymous, if there's any degree of anonymity they (rightly) get shit flung at them.

That's what's nice about HN imo. Fewer bullshitters stinking up the room

My favorite thing about Clubhouse were the profile descriptions people chose to write about themselves. Somehow they were even worse than Twitter profile descriptions, and were both deeply unironic and hilariously serious.

Ever meet someone with a doctorate degree who insists on being addressed as "Doctor" So-and-so at all times? I've only met a handful of people like that, thankfully, but it was like Clubhouse was a shining light in the night to these self-obsessed moths.

I sincerely tried using clubhouse, but all I could find were rooms that I can only describe as South indian sex rings? I was not expecting that

sounds like every crypto Twitter Space I've lurked in.

I think the whole trend started because some vcs thought that their own voices were important and needed to be heard. Looked like a vanity sector overall

Just like the short-lived social olfactory trend started because some vcs thought their shit didn't stink.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISmell

https://www.wired.com/1999/11/digiscent/

https://thehustle.co/digiscents-ismell-fail

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17476460

Nobody would put the smell of shit over a picture of anything. Electronic olfactory stimulation would cement marketing associations for children aged 0-12. If somebody ever figured out the technical side of delivering smells affordable and instantly, he/she would have subtle influence over people years after they are exposed to the initial entertainment product that built an association and memory in the child.

I take it you haven't heard of Prolitec[0].

Olfactory memory is exceptionally strong[1], and if a marketer could successfully tap into it, I imagine very positive outcomes.

[0] https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/prolitec-reinvents-ambien...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_memory

I thought you were posting April Fools articles until I saw the YYYY/MM part of the Wired URL.

Yeah, VC's that invested were propping it up, I saw this cycle repeat on there.

1. Some influential investor/entrepreneur/vs/elon musk type would tweet about the app.

2. The tweet would gain traction, news media would pick it up and write a story.

3. News articles were a sign that the app was "popular".

4. Everyone kept harping on about "installs".

Though it appeared that Clubhouse was going viral in popularity. It was really just a media echo chamber fueled by the "installs". People would hear about the app, install it and create an account, then play with it for 5 minutes before never opening the app again. But that mere install caused the cycle above to repeat.

In the end you had a ton of "installs", and barely any active users.

It honestly felt like something being willed into existence by the sheer desire of the VC community trying to create a new channel that was conducive to monetization.

Exactly. The real question is, Was Social Audio Ever Alive? Betteridge's Law applies.

I feel like Clubhouse fell bang in the "This is a feature, not a product" [1] hole and have simply not been able to get out of it, esp once other apps came up with their own live-audio functionality (and given how Twitter and Clubhouse were very closely entwined, the launch of Twitter Spaces and Twitter pushing it quite aggressively was probably the nail in the coffin).

Honestly though, I always felt like live audio was just a pandemic-era overhyped field[2] which still needs a few years in the sun before becoming ready for primetime, because the current implementations do not really bring anything fresh (or useful imo) to the table that other forms of communication don't bring with them (be it Youtube livestreams or podcasts or whatnot)

[1] https://www.yannickoswald.com/post/the-hottest-question-in-v...

[2] And it's not just limited to Clubhouse, but also region specific apps like Leher (https://leher.app/) which pivoted from social audio to some weird "do tasks to earn money" model

When your primary means of user acquisition is via somebody else's social network then this will always happen. Clubhouse built a neat little feature and then tried to leverage Twitter to get people to use it. But then Twitter just built it themselves and took all the lunch money. This has happened numerous times. Another high-profile example was Meerkat/Periscope. The best you can hope for is to be acquired/acqui-hired by said social network a la Periscope. But that's very rare.

It's definitely a feature, not a product. I've listened to a few of the live discussions on Twitter between experts in the Ukraine War (e.g. Michael Kofman and Rob Lee were in it), and definitely found that worthwhile. It was, essentially, a live podcast, that took some live questions.

So unlike some of the other commenters in this thread, I do think it has some value and isn't just for VCs' vanity, but it also just feels like a feature. I would never go out of my way to a site that only does this, but when I see a notification of a live stream when I'm already using Twitter, and the subject sounds interesting, I might join.

To be honest most of them start out as features. Their hope is to quickly add enough adjacent features, to retain users by keeping them engaged, surrounding an anchor use case before a competition rolls out their anchor use-case as a feature.

Using Clubhouse as the end-all for social audio does the "space" a disservice, IMO. I used Clubhouse early on and it fell squarely into every single trope and commentary that everyone here is posting about it.

Much later, I was introduced to "Cappuccino" [1], a social audio app that couldn't be more different from Clubhouse. It's slow-social (you only get updates once day (the cappuccino composed of 'beans' that everyone submits). Each audio update is capped at 3 minutes (though you can submit as many as you'd like), and you can attach a photo if you'd like. The app auto-adds some generic intro/outtro music and production cleanup and combines it into a single podcast-like update.

I've found myself using this pretty actively with small groups of friends. The audio-first approach makes it easy to just talk about something (an idea, a life update) for a few moments (low cost to participate). The production value and once-a-day update makes it feel like a nice 'ritual' to receive everyone's updates. The intentionally asyncronousness emphasizes listening and thoughtfulness against trying to hop on to a comment thread. It honestly feels like sending postcards/letters out to folks... but audio. Can you do this as an audio group text? Kind of, yes. But that's like saying "you can recreate instagram by sending photos over whatsapp." Yes, but that misses the point.

I'm not affiliated in any way with them but I think they're a very neat counterpoint to Clubhouse in terms of "social audio" (and slow vs fast social).

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cappuccino-stay-in-touch/id150...

> ” I've found myself using this pretty actively with small groups of friends”

Would people listen to these small updates?

Audio is pretty big in WhatsApp. But it’s widely accepted that audio messages are good for people who send it and bad for who receive (it is a hassle to listen to it, even at 2x, comparing to reading a text message).

Also, your use case seems very well covered by WhatsApp and Telegram.

I am part of a Telegram from a famous writer where he only sends audio messages (one-to-many, closed threads, only accepts emojis). It is hard to differentiate a product enough as an audio only social network to beat Telegram and WhatsApp on most use cases.

Cappuccino only delivers audio messages the next morning, all mixed together in one audio track. You listen to it at your leisure, like drinking a morning coffee, or at least that's the idea. I find WhatsApp voice messages annoying, as I can't tell if they're urgent or not without listening to the full audio message after scrambling to find my headphones. In contrast, I know Cappuccino voice messages aren't urgent, since they're only delivered to me the next morning.

I tried it with a group of friends, but it didn't take off, sadly, for a couple of reasons. But I did not feel annoyed by them the way I do for WhatsApp voice messages. I hope Cappuccino takes off, I think it's a good idea that with good execution that deserves to succeed.

Any parasocial relationships[1] have to be one way to be effective at mass scale. You can't have all of a person's fans talk at the same time. Podcasts are a form of social audio that scales well. Anything that lets someone talk 1:1 with their fans is going to have to have a rate throttling mechanism.

For a while, the obscurity of a platform itself serves as that rate limiter. However, once it kicks off something must replace it, such as pay to meet, or recreating obscurity by random un-announced appearances, etc.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction

Ding ding ding!!!

This.

There are two fundamental problems in mass communication. One is easy, the second is hard.

The easy one is transmission at scale. That is, how does one voice reach many. The forum, the printing press, radio, and television all address this problem.

The hard one is feedback at scale.

There's a profound truth hidden in the adoption of the term "broadcast" to describe radio and television, adopted from agriculture, in which a farmer cast seed grain broadly, and, after some cultivation and tending, harvests the result. The fact that this applies most especially to staple grain crops, in which the key to harvesting is to not treat each individual plant as its own special snowflake. For broadcast media, the harvesting mechanism eventually turned out to be advertising.

It's also interesting to see how scaling feedback has been an ongoing problem with the tech sector. It's easy for a small team to create a tool used by millions or billions of people. It's hard to assimilate feedback from that community in ways that truly add to the value of the product. Mechanisms such as A/B testing often cannibalise long-term value to provide a very short-term, small-scale boost.

In live-lecture formats, I find Q&A sessions to be hugely variable. The best seem to come from small and cultivated audiences, most especially where questions are submitted (usually in writing) and selected for presentation. The worst are both general audiences (questions seem to reflect shallow familiarity with the topic), or `cultivated but politicised groups, in which questions are far more often grandstanding performance art presentations.

Wikipedia's article on scholasticism has a description of the lecture format used at the time, which has long struck me as one that would be interesting (and challenging) to implement in an onlyline sense:

- Lectio: the reading to be considered.

- Meditatio: a time for contemplating what was read.

- Questiones: a discussion of written submitted questions, with controvertial questions being addressed in Disputationes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism#Scholastic_instr...

These were probably sessions with a small group of ~10--15 students, roughly the size of a modern college seminar. Intimacy and familiarity seem key to this, and are the precise opposite of scaling.

Only the tiny minority of "very online" people ever thought it was mainstream in the first place.

I'm a "very online" person and I've never heard of clubhouse outside of recent HN articles.

Not very online enough. But really, i think it's more about your online influence sphere. I've been on the intersection and seen a side where it's big, the other where it's not even felt.

I'm not "very online" at all and I felt like I heard about Clubhouse constantly when it launched.

From mainstream media looking for trends, or from people you knew who used it?

Mostly from the media. I only know a handful of people who even tried it out.

I think you had to be very on Twitter and probably following people at least adjacent to VC

This reminded me of this absolutely hilarious Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/ShaanVP/status/1371972261004070913

>Emily wants to know about the future. Are the rumors true? Will you add VIDEO to clubhouse??

>You pause dramatically.

>... "Video is a bug, not a feature"

>Boom. F*cking Nailed It

This thread is really good, some key points I took:

> But clubhouse is LIVE. So you need something INTERESTING that's ALSO happening RIGHT NOW.

> Your engineers [..] warn you: multiplying "content is interesting" and "content is live" doesn't just make the problem 2x harder..it makes it 200x harder.

> You rebuttle: "Well - Twitch figured out how to do this! Twitch is live content - so clearly it's possible!"

> 1 - twitch creators are live ~40 hours a week. Our best creators do weekly shows. ~3-4 hrs a week max. The game makes content creation easier

> 2 -Twitch is vertically focused (gaming). Clubhouse is horizontal. You need "great content" across EVERY category.

...

> Creators with big audience (proven good content) don't want to switch platforms. Spend an hour "live" on clubhouse reaching 2,000 people... or do a podcast and reach 200,000?

That thread is awesome. Prescient too.

Reading this Twitter thread made me wonder if the future of Clubhouse is in the business sector.

My company has monthly "all hands" meetings where the C-levels dog and pony about what's coming up. Using Zoom for this was OK when everyone was working across two time zones. But in the COVID era we're spread out across many more.

If Clubhouse could come up with a super-easy and super-attractive way for businesses to time-shift this content, it could find paying subscribers. Something along the lines of "Listen (Watch?) the leaders at 10:00amET, or the replays at 10:00amPT, or 9:00amGMT." Recorded, but with the appointment urgency of live.

I know that many tools like Zoom or Teams have the ability to record the video for people to consume later, but from what I've heard from the people in the HR department, it's either complicated, or time-consuming, or both. And for people who are more audio-focused, many times that's a better way to go.

We use Google Meet, which offers a live + stream feature for large groups. Most folks join the stream over the live meet. But within an ~hour after the all hands it's available directly in the calendar invite to rewatch.

It seems like a solved problem?

Not sure what's complicated and time consuming about sharing zoom recordings. I frequently share those with my team and it usually comes down to copy/paste url and passcode into Slack or an email.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1371972261004070913.html

I am a bit disappointed that discussions of audio based social media is basically limited to Clubhouse. Personally I really enjoyed using Dialup. I joined in ~2019 and it was a great place to have real conversations with total strangers. During the quarantines it was one of the best windows I had into the broader world.

Having an intimate conversation with a total stranger is a totally novel form of human interaction and I personally had a lot of good experiences with the service, even though it received none of the massive VC backed hype and media accolades. Personally I think that the problem with clubhouse and its competitor clones is more about how they structured conversations and less about social audio as a medium.

I am a "very online" industry analyst type and I enjoyed listening to a lot of Clubhouse chats in late 2020. It wasn't all nonsense - there was value to be had, particularly around gathering current thoughts and, sometimes, inside baseball on various topics, technologies or companies, but you had to listen to a lot to get any gold. Podcasts are far more efficient if you're in a sector that has some good ones and if you really want to chat yourself, you'd probably do better to just create your own podcast or attend some networking events.

That said, Twitter is a slightly different kettle of fish. Some of the live OSINT spaces around the invasion of Ukraine were hours ahead of mainstream media and did some amazing work earlier this year. Smaller community groups also seem able to use them productively to organize in a way that Clubhouse didn't seem to allow, perhaps because people already have social graphs on Twitter.

Part of it is the synchronous-asynchronous difference.

Clubhouse requires you to be logged in and listening throughout the whole discourse, most other forms of "social media" (Twitter, Facebook, forums, ...) let you drop in and out.

Clubhouse also fails to scale because only one person can be talking at a time. As the number of people in a room N increases, this becomes an increasing limitation... One of those that any software developer should have been able to tell you about ahead of time.

That's a serious enough scaling problem on it's own but socially some people are real blowhards who never quit talking while other people are more like

https://mlp.fandom.com/wiki/Fluttershy#Shyness

and that is all complicated by social dynamics, gender, class, race, hierarchies, power relationships, etc.

That OSINT group for instance with N people could have an output proportional to O(N) if there is no need for coordination between the people, but if everyone is paying full attention to the discussion it is only going to have O(1) productivity.

With regard to the output productivity of the conversation, there's also something to be said about the "narrative control" that limiting speaking to a single person at a time brings.

With voice platforms (including things like Discord, Zoom, etc.), there's always one thread of conversation going on. The meeting is generally a point A to point B discourse where circling back to examine a topic further is awkward and destroys the overall flow. People want to avoid that, so anyone who can manage to dominate the conversation and stop other people from interjecting has the power to effectively manage what comes next. There's a lot of potentially valuable conversations that get lost along the way as a result.

As an aside, I've seen this bleeding into real-world conversations over the past few years as well. Pre- and post-COVID conversations with my peers in college were staunchly different in how they handled side conversations. Perhaps it's just a product of my cohort getting older and more accustomed to the norms of professional communication, but I've noticed far fewer productive side conversations in groups of roughly 7 or more and a much stronger focus on "staying on-topic".

Text-based platforms have long since managed this issue with reply-based systems, threads, and hierarchical, nested conversations (e.g. HN, Reddit, etc.). This is really only possible asynchronously, though. In a voice format, the best you can do is leave to a breakout room or other channel and come back when you're done, but in doing so you're missing out on the conversation in the main thread. Unless we can somehow find a way to work past that limitation, I'm convinced that practically any platform that relies entirely on voice is going to fail to have the reach and community-building effect that something like Discord or Reddit has achieved.

Additionally, all of this also fails to consider the fact that synchronous-only voice is yet another social distractor that demands your attention on someone's terms other than your own. As seems to be the sentiment on HN, I'm pretty staunchly opposed to normalizing yet another consumer of my time as necessary for social acceptance, but perhaps I'm a bad sample of the public opinion.

Apologies if I repeated a bit of what you said here, but the point I'm trying to make is that you're entirely right about the obviousness of this issue. It doesn't take much consideration of the concept to realize that there's an immediate growth problem. Novel as the idea behind social audio might have been, it was doomed from the figurative (and literal) word one.

My son hates on Discord pretty seriously and so do I.

I had fun joining Discords to coordinate play in League of Legends, but there are few things I dread more than the open source project than the open source project that says "join our Discord".

There are numerous problems such as: discords are often divided into way too many sub-rooms, somebody with too much time on their hands is always the first person to introduce the forum to people joining, etc.

Yeah, in retrospect Discord may not have been the best example for the point I was trying to make.

As much as I like what it does right, I also have a lot of criticisms of it. The "too may channels" issue is absolutely real, and it makes a lot of servers overwhelming. It's also not indexable at all, meaning I often have to resort to using the search bar if something isn't pinned. Admittedly the latter of these isn't the worst experience (Discord search outpaces Slack search by a mile in my experience) but the fact of the matter is that finding a specific moment in a conversation in Discord is far more difficult than it is on something like a mid-2000s forum unless threads are required and their usage is enforced.

More important though is the point you made about "somebody with too much time on their hands." Discord definitely pushes the boundaries of asynchrony at times. On bigger servers, it definitely feels like catching up on past messages is less favorable than being online and active as often as possible. This isn't necessarily anything new (while I've never used it, I've heard that IRC occasionally faces a similar issue) but something about it being baked into the nature of the service can feel very invasive at times. I've yet to find a community on Discord that I felt really bonded with outside of people I know IRL or through friends because contribution is far too often king.

Perhaps there are more similarities than I realized between Discord and social audio in the general-use case. Single-stream communication divided up into rooms, favoring of the most active individuals, and an emphasis on synchronicity seem to be common traits between the two. I'm not sure what this could mean for Discord in the future, though.

It always sounded like audio blogs to me.

Isn't that a podcast?

There is also a genre of Youtube video that competes with podcasts. Channels like

https://www.youtube.com/c/BattleshipNewJersey

and

https://www.youtube.com/c/Defunctland

have good visuals but have stand-alone audio tracks and make great background noise when you are doing something else.

This is the ultimate problem with Clubhouse/Twitter spaces.

Podcasts exist. And they're already great for 1 way audio communication.

So Clubhouse had to push for N-way audio communication as a differentiator, and it's really hard for that to be useful.

It's really rare for the audience's contribution to be useful. And it's even rarer for the audience contribution to be useful in a way that cannot be done equally as well, if not better, in an associated chat room with a live podcast.

It took only a moment to realize that Social Audio is about as healthy as Instagram: it's groups of people promoting themselves. If you want to have a call with your friends, that already exists. If you want legitimate information, you have podcasts. There are conferences, panels, etc. Clubhouse got the hype right, but the "market fit" wrong.

I think only 1-2 clubhouses I listened to were any good. It was gamed by opportunists and grifters lightning fast. Lots of noise with very little signal.

I would enjoy it and Twitter spaces more if they supported replay w/ 2x speed, skipping over or only playing certain speakers, or some sort of auto-tagging on topics so you can skip to what's interesting.

I feel like clubhouse is A16z's greatest expected to be success flop. They invested heavily into this app both time, clout and money. Not that I think VCs are able to see the future but they do uptalk the vantage point they have being able to see the bleeding edge in live time. This one shows that even with the advantage that they didn't see it with the right perspective.

FWIW I really enjoyed in the early days when there were certain people on platform. After a bit it became dilutive in content quality and it sadly seemed more like hucksters on platform. If Clubhouse has done a post mortem on how they didn't convert their insane growth - I wager it was that they didn't screen quality.

Clubhouse grew during the pandemic when some people needed to signal to others that they weren't meeting in person. Once that need fell away it started dying.

- Instant uninterestingness

- No slot machine psychology and adhocracy

- Low information density inflates usage time

- Vanity barrier between speakers and listeners

- No evergreen content / Indexability

I got an invite but never signed up, it always felt like "podcasts but worse". I mean sure, there was the opportunity to interact in the audience but I really dislike "forced-realtime" anything. Also the chances that people I look up and respect were on ClubHouse (or similar), at a time I was free, talking about something I had input on, and (most importantly) wanted input from the audience were about 0.

> it always felt like "podcasts but worse".

Even without the live/realtime aspect, I think it can be summed up by:

> I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

> - Blaise Pascal

I don't want to listen to a rambling, un-edited conversation that might be good and/or interesting, I want to listen to a well thought-out talk that is good and interesting, and is only exactly as long as it needs to be.

Edited and/or curated podcasts (or videos) are simply a better avenue for that.

Despite many knocking it here, I think there's at least one significant aspect of the clubhouse/twitter spaces/etc. model of audio chat: the much stronger feeling of connection that people get from being able to literally speak to the big personalities in whatever their area of interest is.

we can debate whether that's good or bad, scalable, a feature or a product. But I think it's undeniable that the emotional dopamine hit people get from that are a lot higher than getting any kind of async response, especially text. It makes it feel much more real. Even if you don't interact at all and just listen, it feels like you're an insider, you've made it into the club, and you could speak up. Like you practically know <insert names>, you were on a call with them earlier today!

That kind of interaction I think we might see a lot more of as a feature for e.g. streaming platforms. People crave it.

That's exactly what their value prop was. Normies get a chance to feel like they're friends with famous people.

It's social status signalling as a service.

I always thought the idea of Clubhouse was just a boring hype and deleted the app within 24h of starting to use it.

Always thought it was just me. Apparently it really was a hype. At least in that form of it.

Everyone except some terminally online journalists and social media "experts" understood this was a hype and a stupid product doomed to fail.

VCs were pumping this hard. Journalists wouldn't have cared if Musk and other famous people weren't popping in during the initial hype phase.

I think Clubhouse was perhaps another VC pump and dump. Not necessarily deliberate, but that general flavour of startup that investors hoped to massive inflate and grab market share, with the expectation that there is some early mover advantage to be had in a new category. But because they were only manufacturing demand, rather than creating something people really wanted, it's just not worked out.

> I think Clubhouse was perhaps another VC pump and dump.

Attempted* quick pump and dump. They tried to get Twitter to acquire it for $4B and that failed so they are now scrambling to make money or make it worthy of an IPO.

Since either outcome is unlikely, they are most likely to do a down-round with more layoffs as a consequence and probably close down in the next 5 years.

Social audio is not dead. It existed for decades, and it was known as... conference call.

Before internet, we used conference calls in our friends circle and among relatives, a lot.

Now we do a group call in Meet or Telegram.

And Discord has a lot of very active social voice in many channels.

Data is so cheap in so many places, people often just opt for video. But what many people still prefer is just audio calls.

Social audio is not dead. What is dead is Clubhouse who were stupid enough to believe that hype alone could cause growth and made normies beg or pay for invites. And who only released an app for a platform that is practically non-existent outside oof the US and the EU.

I’m surprised Clubhouse is still around. I gave it a try as a way to have informal discussion with friends, former colleagues etc. I also tried to listen to a few events, but as other people have pointed out, one could be forgiven for thinking it was satire.

What made me uninstall the app and forget about the service was the sleazy grabbing at my contact list and that Clubhouse came across as completely insincere. The image Clubhouse quickly acquired here in Norway was as a service for gullible suckers.

Most of Clubhouse was a vacuum of hot garbage, but this medium _can_ be great.

It was interesting to experience a really great example of social audio -- as a guest on a "show" for blind and low vision podcasters. The perfect use of the perfect medium, I think.

The differentiator was the work and preparation done by the host. But that doesn't make this a completely new medium -- all of the traditional elements of a live radio programme were there; a great host (who keeps things moving), organised guests in advance, and a community with Q&As from the audience members.

What was new was the tooling, and the ability for such an extensive show to be made in software and operated by one person (and a blind one at that).

https://the-blind-podmaker.pinecast.co/episode/df71fa32/blin...

Is there a description of the cycle that failed products or innovations go through? For successful ones, there's,

First, they laugh at you,

Then, they tell you it's not in the orthodoxy,

Then they tell you they knew it all along.

As trite and simplistic as that is, I find it to be a reliable prediction; I think what it really reflects is an instinct to resist change, to unconsciously follow the status quo. By the last stage, the innovation becomes the status quo and it's sincere in one way: the people who 'knew it all along' truly followed the status quo all along.

What is the cycle for failed innovations? An end stage is schadenfreude. In fact, the end stage is exactly the same: They 'knew' all along that it would fail, it just has some schadenfreude added.

All the stages may be the same. If someone predicts every challenging innovation will fail, they'll usually be right! And regardless, they are sticking with the status quo throughout.

For me, Clubhouse went from an exclusive party of real-name people I wanted to meet to an open party with lots of pseudonymous/anonymous accounts.

Especially on a live social audio platform, which requires so much of my attention, I wanted to know who I was talking to and be excited to meet them, and that became harder and harder.

Most rooms were just self absorbed narcissistic people talking to each other.

“Social” anything is a wasteland. Just build useful tools that help people do things, like buy plane tickets.

I'm currently working on a social Audio take tied into podcasting (which is very much alive). The idea is to have live podcasting a la Twitch or YouTube live, including chat and tipping. You can also invite other people to record the show with and even bring in members from the audience. At the end, it let's you download everything as Mp3 for post editing and publishing as a podcast. The live discussion will remain open as part of https://podbabble.com.

The thesis is that while social Audio with proprietary recordings and time bound broadcasts failed, adding a social aspect to the fastgrowing podcasting space while retaining creator control and open formats will succeed.

>The thesis is that while social Audio with proprietary recordings and time bound broadcasts failed, adding a social aspect to the fastgrowing podcasting space while retaining creator control and open formats will succeed.

And how is that theory proving up?

Dunno, not released yet :-)

Fascinating.

I read the entire article without learning what social audio or Clubhouse are.

I would say it’s probably closest to a ‘live podcast’.

So... unscheduled radio talk show?

The obvious competitors are:

- scheduled radio talk show. They may be inane but they're professional and consistent

- recorded podcast: has the major advantages of being listenable on your own schedule and possibly well-edited

- youtube: same as podcast, but with video as well

- youtube live: the chat allows more people to participate simultaneously than folks trying to get airtime

- discord: it's live and you might even know or get to know all the participants

That's a lot of competition and not much in visible advantages

$4 Billion acquisition talks with Twitter is going to be revealed as the mother of lost opportunity

>Is social audio already dead?

The general rule of thumb, is that any headline that ends in a question mark is answered by "no," but I think that this one is "yes."

Clubhouse, Marco Polo, etc. have not been very compelling; for different reasons. I think Clubhouse couldn't compete with video broadcast media, like TikTok, and Marco Polo also couldn't, but because it is one-to-one, without social "scoring."

Also, the Clubhouse app wasn't very good, and was iOS-only. I think that it’s a good example of one that should probably have been done via a hybrid system.

I think that, if we will release a native platform app, it needs to be absolutely top-Quality. No compromises. That's the case for the app I'm writing now.

For it to be dead, must it not have been alive first?

From my perspective it clearly was not.

> and was iOS-only.

I think that was a feature not a bug. Strengthened the FOMO.

The problem, IMO, is the “live” nature of things like Clubhouse/Spaces. Your audience has to be actively engaged at the right moment to get distribution, and even then you’re subject to the randomness that is live content. No ability to edit the boring parts out or add production value.

Something that is like Twitter for Podcasts would be interesting I think. 1-5 minute audio clips designed to be consumed asynchronously, presented in a sort of timeline manner where you could feasibly just hit play and listen for 30m, getting quick hit audio content from 5-10 creators

Imagine informative YouTube videos but without the “what’s up guys in this video we’re …blah blah” sort of fluff. Just straight to the point.

"A quick message from our sponsor before we get to the video - RAID shadow legends!"

Do you cry sometimes? Borrow checker got you down? Try BetterHelp!

If you mix the creators into a single timeline that sorts of turns it into a voice-only TikTok.

I've been toying with an idea that's more of an async version of the Marco Polo app but for podcast-type content. Async bites of a single podcast episode which may involve one or more contributors continuously adding to the episode/discussion.

Does anything like either of these exist already?

Can’t think anyone who ever sat through it as a listener ever saw it going anywhere.

It was like the worst possible parts of a podcast amplified 1000% with zero of the upsides.

Just self-important low-talent bluechecks blowing smoke up each other in a self-promo-off.

I was an early Clubhouse user. The initial conversations were very beneficial and very interesting. Over time, as more people got access, it started to turn into virtue signaling sessions on one end and super wack conversations about crypto on the other. It basically turned into an audio version of Twitter. After a couple of months, I ended up deleting the application.

My wife uses Marco Polo a lot with her family. It's a great way for them to maintain an async conversation. I think for group no larger than five people, it makes a lot of sense.

Is social audio dead? No. I do think that the market size is definitely a lot smaller.

> The initial conversations were very beneficial and very interesting. Over time, as more people got access, it started to turn into virtue signaling sessions on one end and super wack conversations about crypto on the other.

Eternal September all over again.

Was never alive. Only reason clubhouse thrived briefly was artificial constraints to create an aura of exclusivity

Someone should tell them about discord.

and mumble, vent, xfire, teamspeak. Social audio isn't dead, it's one of the most consistently good aspects of technology because these idiots haven't figured out how to ruin it by trying to monetize the social aspects of it. I've spent my evening in a voice chat for the last 20 years, it's a solved problem.

I actually built something in this space in the last two years called roundtable.audio (https://roundtable.audio/). I actually also created an HN extension found here: https://hackernews.roundtable.audio/. See this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26856883.

I've thought about it quite bit, and I think one of the long-term strategies to revive the space is having live-audio conversations attached to specific news articles, tweets, and other places on the web which prompt discussion. I also considered creating a chrome extension at one point which allows someone visiting an arbitrary webpage to be able to audio chat with those who are also on the same page.

I'm planning on shutting down the deployment for roundtable.audio in the coming months, so if anyone wants to take these projects and run with them, I'd be happy to chat about how to collaborate or hand things over. The repo is open-source as well, but I'd certainly like to hear what you plan on doing with it or how I can help!

Clubhouse was unfortunate to come about in the crypto boom. lots of inate crypto chat on there.

Seems to affect Twitter as well. Every time I've checked out the Spaces tab in the app, the featured Spaces were 90% NFT / crypto promotion.

Yeah, but that’s just one part of its local maximum. If crypto didn’t exist, I feel confident the hustle porn, personal finance and entrepreneurship stuff (more “How I Make $1000/mo In Passive Income”-style content and less Startup School) would rush to fill the gap.

At the very least that would be marginally tenable to deal with and would have /some/ sort of variety to the conversation.

The main people interested in talking to large groups of strangers are selling something, if not crypto boom it would be something else.

On the contrary, I suspect it wouldn't have enjoyed what success it had without being able to lean on some very monetary FOMO.

Or perhaps the crypto boom made it popular in a way which it would never be in the first place?

Crypto at least gave it a chance.

What prevented Clubhouse from quickly devolving into an ersatz Discord. I feel like the audio chat capability + community management was already there.

For one, iOS only is a non-starter.

At a previous company I attended regular team lunches with a particularly obnoxious colleague. It wasn't that he was a bad guy, just a snob who liked the sound of his own voice and talking over people with his pseudo intellectual rantings and ravings.

Clubhouse replicates that experience almost too well. The only thing missing is the food and the obligation to be present.

I hope so. It's a very wasteful and low resolution way to share information.

We've had telephones and group calls since before we had computers, and there is a reason why we shifted to text.

Plus the platform is inherently not accessibility friendly.

It just makes no sense overall, but I can see why it was quick burning fad.

On the contrary, voice is too high resolution. Live and interactive, with no video to distract, makes it immediately obvious when someone is bullshitting you, compared to text (especially 140char limited) or pre-recorded videos/podcasts.

The only thing clubhouse would be worth for is improv comedy, but there are not enough good troupes.

On the other hand voice is half duplex, transfers data slowly and doesn’t retransmit lost fragments.

Agree to disagree I guess.

Never actually tried it. From the descriptions I saw, it seemed like it would be like Twitter, but with actual yelling. Who would want that? Maybe the real product was better than that, but it didn't seem like a lot of incentive to try.

I never used Clubhouse, but most Twitter Spaces aren't really like that. The reason is because unlike normal Twitter only a limited number of people are speakers, and you have to be selected by the host to speak. It's more like niche panel shows with a live audience, and sometimes Q+A with people being selected from the audience to ask a question.

but what advantage does that have against podcasts when you can't participate unless you know the host? I could just listen to a conversation that's been recorded and get the same benefit, without having to schedule a live conversation I can't take part in.

I don't see the draw over a podcast style show. Most live audience questions suck.

I tried clubhouse and I remember when I lost interest.

I had joined a room full of people discussing cryptocurrencies (more than 500 people). I mistakingly thought it was an open forum to discuss the technology.

After being picked to ask a question, I asked the “thought leaders” of the group whether or not the technology itself made sense, or you could just utilize a singular (centralized) database to solve some of the problems some currencies are proposing to solve. Also the fact that computational power is wasted on hashing.

I was instantly called a “shill”, creating “FUD.”

In fact I didn’t even get to finish to finish my question and I was muted and called a “motherfucker.”

Yea.

I have no respect for that app anymore.

Well I wanted to register and use it, but registration was closed. I've subscribed to be notified when the registration will be open again, but notification never came. Later I forgot about it completely.

I never registered for Clubhouse, and forgot about it so completely I can't remember why I wasn't interested. There was a reason but I forgot what it was.

In the meantime I listened to a few interesting current-events discussions on Twitter Spaces, but only by coincidence that I happened to see them as I was browsing right after work. I don't see how anyone can build a business on only this type of content, it's too synchronous.

   Yes.

I'm still struggling for anyone to give me a concrete answer as to why Clubhouse is worth $4B or even $1B at the time. [0] Monetisation-wise, Clubhouse looks like a solution, looking for a problem via hair-splitting a niche which already has been solved 'generally' by everyone else.

It is not early days and Clubhouse looks like it is going to either shutdown or get acquired in the next 5 years.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883362

No, it's alive and well, you just aren't invited. You can't engineer or buy access into communities that you are not cool enough to be a part of. If you do somehow manage it, the core people who made the community cool before you showed up will quickly move elsewhere

SV nerds gotta stop trying to invite themselves to cool people parties, it's cringe. Accept your limitations as well as your strengths. Accept that real membership in those communities has a price that you are not actually willing and/or able to pay

Beyond the criticism of the format, I found the explicit clout chasing to be completely offputting, and I think I used Clubhouse a grand total of 3x before never turning it on.

I would genuinely love to read an anthropologist dive into what causes social networks to take that turn. At its best, Twitter is full of smart nerdy people talking about science, mathematics, history, etc..

Clubhouse feels like LinkedIn, completely detached from resumes, so everyone wanted to post thinkpieces without being in any way tethered to their concrete achievements.

But that begs the question: why would anyone of note use Clubhouse, if not as an continuation of the mostly "one-way megaphone" strategy that made them big on Twitter or elsewhere?

I like Callin — I listen to Wes Yang and Jesse Singal on there. It seems like every show has a technical glitch or a user who doesn’t understand muting/unmuting, but overall I like it.

I've been enjoying Callin: https://www.callin.com/

Its not as crowded as Clubhouse and all the low signal to noise hustlers aren't there (yet).

There's a few podcasts that are getting traction.

Pull Request: Had the Paypal Mafia over and Emil Micheal talked about Super Pumped tv series.

The hosts may have differing opinions and political views though, so might not be for everybody.

It’s not dead. It was popular because of it’s novelty, and now it’s just another form of communication or content consumption. Unfortunately for Clubhouse, that means that as soon as big social networks copy you, you need to innovate or die. Network effects of bigger social media are too powerful for Clubhouse, so it’s a bit of an unfair fight.

But is there any momentum in the big-network-copycats anyway?

I believe it's not about Clubhouse in particular, but the whole idea, so even if Facebook copies it, it's still a dead-end (but would still do in order to dominate the space and keep users in).

Dead? No. But it's not the wildly popular service that people thought it would be. Clubhouse is mostly a dumpster fire. Someone might figure out the right way to do it, but right now it's a clunky mess of toxic rooms with the occasional substantive conversation.

They tried the classic strategy of making it invite-only (and iPhone-only) at first, and while this did work initially, I think it also established a culture of elitism that made me never want to install the app.

That and I'm busy. I don't have time for appointment listening.

A lot of the comments here are saying that Clubhouse is a lot of noise and very little signal. I largely agree that's what did it in, but I think I joined right before it hit that growth inflection point, and I was able to find something of a community until everyone kind of gave up.

One night I had a discussion with a guy who had protested at Tiananmen Square in 1989, then went back to his university the day before the tanks rolled in. Later, he emigrated to the US.

I met and befriended another guy who lived in Austin and was giving updates about the then-current Texas freeze. He was loosely connected to some of the folks behind NumPy/Anaconda, and so I got to spend several nights hanging out with them, which was pretty interesting.

The biggest problem was always search/reputation (judging from my re-opening of the app for the first time in months, this is still the biggest problem). It was always gamed by "influencer" types, whose number one skill was glomming onto the New Hotness/Current Thing. Usually when opening the app, I'd need to scroll through one or two screen lengths of junk (e.g. "chat w/ [retired pro athlete] NFTs!!!", "be your own record label!!!") to find a topic that seemed remotely interesting.

Filtering was (is?) hot garbage until I was following around 50 active users. The product people never realized that the truly influential people who were interesting were not on Clubhouse 16 hours a day, but would be on for an hour or two; the rest of the time, they were honing their craft at something outside of influencer culture.

The other major problem was notification fatigue. I went through a phase of intense work on a side project, and didn't have time for Clubhouse very often. The app had some bug where it wouldn't respect my relatively spartan notification preferences, and was pinging me all the time, so I just disabled them altogether. A couple months later, I realized I had not been in there for a while, and when I logged in, few of the people I had connected with were still active (this was around a year ago).

Ultimately, I think Clubhouse was an idea that in its current implementation could only exist during the pandemic. That being said, at times it felt like YouTube did back in '06 or Twitter in 2010: you could connect with anyone and learn about nearly any topic with a bit of dedication. Unlike a lot of the social networking experiences these days, it truly felt like there was a chance to meet someone who in the regular course of life you'd never get to meet.

It's not dead it just got effectively integrated into existing networks like Twitter. I love spaces! I think there will be more innovation in the future with social audio but clubhouse felt like a flash in the pan to be sure.

Social audio isn’t dead - I see it becoming a more prominent feature on existing social networks. Never used or heard about Clubhouse when it came out but recently I’ve been using Twitter spaces and I’ve found it to be very valuable. In financial twitter I’ve joined spaces with some great discussion that I can’t seem to find anywhere else. Big part of it is the drop-in drop-out nature of it. So you’ll have analysts from different sectors joining a space to offer their 2cents and ask really great questions. Really all you need to do is @ a blue checkmark and there is a high chance they will join to weigh in.

I can see LinkedIn adding a feature like this in the future - though I think LinkedIn spaces would be terrible (insane amount of self-promotion ugh). Reddit is already testing it.

Was always dead since there was no way prior to a conversation possible to assess the quality of it. Unless you are playing/horsing around, who’s willing to play the lottery with their time like that?

Social audio has the same problem of an audio message: it comes always in the moment you cannot listen to it. Even worse, a message from a friend or relative has much bigger priority.

Maybe it's dead in the way Vine (Twitter) was, until TikTok came in and took over the social media space. There is a use-case for social audio but it may need some refinement.

Clubhouse was really fun and interesting around Feb 2021.

Then they started rolling out the “Creator” crap, and tbh their overemphasis and product development around cultures was a turn off.

Was it ever particularly alive in the mainstream? Can't say I ever encountered anybody other than marketers/talking heads/influencers who were into it.

This is the first I have ever heard of it, so I'm guessing not.

For me it never started, as I never got the point of them.

They seemed to evolve into another kind of TED talks, but even without trying to do anything quality wise in proper content.

Twitter Spaces is actually a reasonably good product. I heard that Twitter offered to acquire Clubhouse but Clubhouse turned them down - that was a bad decision.

One overvalued flash in the pan does not constitute a trend.

Does this site go into an endless reload loop for anyone else? I wonder if it's my content blockers or something else...

Wasn’t clubhouse taken over by political activists? I recall something like that contributing to its downfall.

This was the first time I've ever heard of this term. I'm still not sure what it is exactly.

Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces (possibly deprecated), Spotify Live are three of the biggest.

Apparently Twitter had been in talks to acquire Clubhouse for $4bil. Hindsight is 20/20.

The Android version is still incredibly buggy and borderline unusable, one year in.

clubhouse doesn't scale because the more people are talking, the less you can tell which conversation is important or matters. The success of clubhouse is its own destruction.

Good riddance. I hope a16z lost a lot of money.

"Is social audio already dead?"

One can hope...

I didn't even know it was sick.

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