The only criticism I would have of this article is that it misses the underlying issue. There was never a reason for high status individuals to be on clubhouse, the reason they were there has nothing to do with the pandemic - it was because of the pump and dump style of Andreesen Horrowitz and the silicon valley obsession with being an early adopter.
A16Z seemingly thought simply by telling everyone how excited they were about Clubhouse they could turn Clubhouse into being something to be excited about. The problem being that the reality undermined them though - just as they were telling people to be excited about the innovative conversations on Clubhouse, the number one story was some CEO getting arsey about a journalist reporting the news- a fundamentally petty and narcissistic look for an App that needed to be seen as cool and new. So Elon and co did their "Oh look at us we're early adopters dance" but never invested in the platform - because there was never a reason to, and that failure to give a value proposition to the people they wanted to harvest value from was their core issue.
I think you hit on a good point re: status, and in that way Clubhouse is very reminiscent of TED (remember when that was an obsession?) - people gathering to hear pre-eminent experts and learn.
Which of course is an admirable thing to do! Listening to well-crafted presentations by learned experts and expanding your knowledge is fantastic!
But of course we know how that went - participation in TED quickly became a status marker (not helped by the exorbitant cost of tickets), and the organization capitalized by spinning off TEDx talks all over the world that ended up being filled with more charlatans and hucksters than genuine experts... which seems to have been the direction Clubhouse has also gone.
It's a bit sad - I think Clubhouse could have been something great - though arguably the "listen to experts talk" thing is better fulfilled by podcasts than a live format. Maybe what the world needs isn't a live streaming platform but an authoring tool that makes it really easy to get people together to talk, record a podcast, and distribute it. The bar to podcasting has been lowered a lot in recent years, but it's still substantial to produce a quality product.
I think there's also something to be said here for FOMO and what I've taken to calling "the unknowability of ideas" - I think genuinely investors have no idea why some ideas succeed (see: Facebook), but are terrified of missing out on the next big thing. The combination of this is that many SV VCs seem to regard the quality of ideas as unknowable - you can never pooh-pooh anything, because the last thing you thought was shite turned out to be a multi-billion dollar company, and therefore ideas are literally unjudgeable. The FOMO seems to induce a lot of hype over some companies/products even though the people doing the hyping themselves don't seem to understand why.
As someone trying to bootstrap a podcast, yeah that bar is lower, but there's still a lot of work that simply can't be automated or made better with tooling (things like marketing, logo, etc.) but there's some clear areas where I think it would be possible to innovate, such as using AI to cut out long dead space, 'umms', and other minor vocal glitches that are simple but very tedious to cut out.
The idea of listening to party-line style conversations isn't totally insane. Hypothetically good content could be created this way, and it seems that happened at least a few times. But the product was and is just awful.
The discovery function sucks, it's just a crappy stream of mostly low-value hustle culture nonsense that feels like mid-2000's junk mail subject lines. There's no way (that actually works) to change that to something that guides you to decent content.
There's an alternate version of this story where they had a really great technical founding team that reacted to the influx of users and hype by really rapidly iterating on the product and making everyone have a great experience.
Instead everyone signed up via exclusive invite and spent a few rounds trying to figure out why they fuck they should care and eventually gave up because they shouldn't.
>The idea of listening to party-line style conversations isn't totally insane
I honestly think it's one of the most perverse ideas in a long time. We built the internet, a tool of frictionless communication, where everyone can talk to everyone without the limits of the physical world, and what do we get, a nightclub with artificial room size limits so people can brag about attending a virtual cocktail party with Elon Musk
I hadn't thought about it like that. A16Z is behind Substack as well, and they seeded the platform by paying well-known writers six-figure advances to set up Substack exclusive newsletters.
It's impossible to do that with Clubhouse, because people are joining to hear the rich and famous speak, and the rich aren't going to set up residencies on some app.
Quora doesn't really depend on status. If some random 17-year-old in Nicaragua who's really into the topic you asked about can provide the answer to your question, that's a good outcome. Clubhouse was not about knowledge transfer in that way. While Quora works like a "ask a librarian" hotline, Clubhouse was more like Comic-Con, where the identity of the speaker is the most important thing.
Except that doesn’t happen on Quora. So what happens on Quora?
You ask a question - when did Titanic sink? And usually the answers would be someone talking about how (in)accurate the film is. They’d talk about where they went to college. They’d talk about their exes and how they missed the last bus home after they watched the film with their ex. If they’re in the mood you’ll also get to learn about mangoes and furniture. Things like what’s the chemical formula of water and then that of ice after enacting a cliffhanger. Or secret knowledge such as ice is kinda harder than water. And some lamenting thoughts such as it was all the fault of ice. They were at the wrong time in the wrong waters. They might have forgotten about mentioning the day when Titanic sank. Good part is by now you would have forgotten that as well.
But it could have worked. At some point the hype cycle could have become self-sustaining. What you are calling pump and dump could be seen as starting an internal combustion engine. It's just that Clubhouse sputtered instead of firing up.
Come to think of it, isn't all celebrity news like this? People who are famous because they are famous?
> it was because of the pump and dump style of Andreesen Horrowitz and the silicon valley obsession with being an early adopter.
Just look at the hype at the peak of the mania: [0]
They orchestrated and they (a16z) got others to hype the app that raised $1B and they don't even explain why it is that valuable.
They tried to exit to Twitter and it fell through. Now the hype squad panics and immediately injects billions into Clubhouse totalling it to $4B valuation, which I do not understand and they start spamming the notifications in the app.
This is what they do. This is what the hype squad does and they did it well with Clubhouse. Well played; Except I saw all through the hype.
I can't imagine that spat with a journalist mattered even a little bit one way or the other (and it's not exactly a consensus view that she came out looking better than the CEO, though you clearly think that's the case). Mentioning it here sounds more like personal axe-grinding than anything else.
The status game is their answer to discovery, because ultimately Clubhouse's biggest problem is content quality. I ticked all the interests boxes, perused through the suggested rooms, and never ever waltzed into a room that I found interesting (after about 20 tries).
The exception is a weekly room I was invited to by a friend. That room has been amazing. I've met people, had fun and interesting conversations, and gotten a lot of value out of the app.
So Clubhouse is using one mechanism that's probably Almost Right, the "follows," to help discover rooms that are going to be worth your time. This then creates a status game, and it's very real; our weekly room had a million-follower person get on stage for about 15 seconds, and we suddenly had 1000+ people in the audience. It was a bit like a Twitch raid from a popular streamer.
> Now that high status people can be seen in person again, they are spending less time on Clubhouse. Lower status people are left trying to be seen amongst themselves. Without high status people, Clubhouse is not serving its purpose of helping people be seen. It is a cargo cult: low status people recreating the actions of high status people, after they have left, thinking it will cause them to be high status.
I have to agree. Clubhouse imploded around February and it's been a sad scene since then.
Their security could be perfect, and I still wouldn't use it because there is nothing on there that I really care about hearing. Meanwhile, their imperfect security would not stop me from using them if there was good content on there. So I do think, at least for a not insubstantial slice of their possible userbase, content is probably a bigger problem than their security and privacy.
I just think it speaks to a bigger issue, which is one that is cultural - if they can't get the fundamentals right, what else are they screwing up? This isn't the 90s - in this day and age this stuff matters.
> if they can't get the fundamentals right, what else are they screwing up?
It was the lack of an Android app for more than a year (Android accounts for more than 70% of marketshare worldwide) [0], plus they have kept the invite system in place even when all their competitors have already cloned them to death.
Finally on top of that, the end of lockdowns for hundreds of millions, worldwide and getting back to normal.
By the time all of that was phased out and the Android app released, everyone went back to Twitter, Discord and Reddit and the Clubhouse hype died.
Clubhouse is fundamentally a poor user experience. Dropping into a live discussion mid-stream is a pretty inefficient way to consume content...takes about 10-15 minutes to understand the flow of the conversation.
Most of the clubhouse influencers treat it as a low-effort way to just start a channel and brain dump whatever's on their mind compared to curated/planned content that you see on Youtube or high quality blog posts. In fact that's how it was sold to marketers (low effort, high yield).
A friend gave me an invite a couple of months ago. He seemed to really like it so I figured I'd give it a go. WTAF? Seems to be mostly teens gossiping at this point. I quickly deleted the app.
Everyone, including some small startups have already added Clubhouse-like functionality into their own apps.
Look at Discord, Facebook / Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Spotify, Telegram, and even small startups like 'Public' have treated it like a feature, which is why Clubhouse is losing users.
The only daily active users there are a16z and the same VCs of Clubhouse. I still don't know why it is worth $4B.
It is a useful feature, but I doubt that’s why clubhouse is losing users. If clubhouse truly had interest conversations from interesting people all of whom derived benefit from these conversations it wouldn’t have lost to these other platforms because of network effects. Everyone was on clubhouse.
I think the article does a good job backing up their theory about why clubhouse’s network effect has evaporated. People were there because it was a great way to show status during the pandemic. Now that other status displaying activities have opened up, they’ve left it en masse.
Anecdatapoint: I don't recall hearing anyone talk about Clubhouse - or at least not in enough detail that it actually stuck with me what it was - before this post.
I may live under a small rock, but others must be under here with me. Some app? Okay, moving on. Sometimes the network effect is so focused that the in-network and the out-network can't perceive each other.
I do think that Clubhouse was aiming for a different use case than what's happening in these other apps. I say this as a daily user of Slack Huddles (love 'em) and frustrated week-long Clubhouse user, but mostly as a product market-fit analyst.
The problem is, the market Clubhouse is trying to create is a Wild West without near-perfect content curation. It's going to fail a hundred times before taking off and when it does it's not going to be as big as everyone though initially, much like groupon.
> Rooms are smaller and driven by interests or topics, rather than the people involved
And this is a good thing. I recently did a room with an optics engineer from NASA who made the optics for Cassini’s Composite IR Spectrometer. And now the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and the Vera Rubin Observatory. The conversation went into exacting depth, with all of us enjoying it a lot and learning along the way. It felt like a salon, not a club.
Earlier I was doing a room with the discoverer of 2014 UN271, the largest comet discovered so far. The Chief Scientist of NASA joined in and we spent an hour discussing possible missions through this ancient comet’s plume.
The discoverer of the object got to meet NASA’s Chief Scientist to talk about his baby, and NASA’s Chief Scientist got to nerd out with us on the largest comet ever found.
We also talked about algorithms etc for better finds.
These conversations exist. They often happen in private. Or in clubs like Small Steps & Giant Leaps. There weren’t more than 40 people in the “room” and if you’d had raised your hand, we’d have pulled you up to nerd out with us.
I'm interested in knowing what your Club's name is on Clubhouse. I also regularly host rooms with a focus on learning, bringing on an Indian space scientist this weekend.
Clubhouse is a case where I expect the Twitter clone (Spaces) to eat their lunch.
Twitter gives a social graph, and an asynchronous way to get to know people (accounts, really, one of the signatures of Twitter is how normal pseudonymity is).
Spaces then gives the ability to throw together a little Clubhouse (synchronous voice chat) on top of that.
My bet is that this works better as a feature, not a platform, and that the rise of Clubhouse was in fact an artifact of the pandemic. We'll see what happens.
That's always the expectation when a startup blows up to fill a niche in a space dominated by giants. "Facebook/Google/Microsoft will release this any day now and all the users will move over." Historically speaking, the chances of that happening are very slim.
Where Clubhouse is concerned, it's just... not social enough. If you load it when you don't know something special is happening, and just wander into random rooms, the chance of disappointment is high.
In that moment, it isn't competing with Twitter Spaces, it's competing with podcasts. I would bet most users of Clubhouse also listen to podcasts, and the chance that they can load up some audio that they know will be interesting is pretty high.
So Clubhouse's social network is weak. You can't just flip through Clubhouse real quick when you're stuck in line, and even when you have some time to kill, it's a crap shoot whether you'll find something fun. Where it really shines is special events, but that's not much of a moat.
Twitter and Spaces is synergetic, since Twitter is always there, ready to offer you an infinite scroll of witticism, cute cat pictures, and the Main Character of the Day. It's ok if Spaces is kind of useless unless there's a special event.
There's also the serendipity effect where you can be scrolling the timeline and see someone say "hey we're hanging out on Spaces", and just pop over.
Clubhouse has a head start, and some remaining halo effect, but no real moat, nothing to keep the conversation on Clubhouse. The big draws on Clubhouse all have Twitter accounts, they can try out Spaces any time they want. If it works for them, they switch, and if enough of them switch, it's over.
It's not inevitable, but it is something I'm starting to see happen in the circles I frequent.
There's a really salient point about reliability of quality content here - I curate which podcasts I listen to, so in my downtime, I can quickly pull those up. Unless my downtime is after 6:30PM at night, all the Clubhouse convos going on are amongst completely random and irrelevant people
What’s their lead in that space? I saw some quite impressive filters there, although it’s just filters, and there are the snapchat spectacles which are interesting and I’m happy they iterating on that. Am I missing something?
I wouldn't really say it's a substantial lead, but Snapchat acquired Bitmoji for online avatars, and another map based location company. From what I understand, they are moving into their AR glasses and have plans to partner with game devs to incorporate your bitmoji avatar into the experience (kinda like Mii's) I don't know whether this will ultimately amount to anything since I don't use it, but they do have some semblance of a direction they seem to be taking the company towards.
I'm not a filter pro, but I feel like there's a real difference between the ones on snapchat and the ones on instagram. Actually, so much that people use the snapchat filters and post them on instagram and tiktok. I figured that out when I wanted to try these crazy disney princess filters after seeing them everywhere on these platforms. It looks like this if you want to see why I was impressed seeing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zts4s2IbANo
Snapchat's is just advertising space. The pie is bigger and big enough to accommodate Snapchat's ability to sell shares at the $100bn valuation.
Every fledgling idea and initiative everywhere uses borrowed or pooled money and tries to go viral by doing their ambiguous "marketing" on those platforms. If you don't, your stakeholders will blame you.
Dabbling in VR is a tiny tiny tiny part of why the story works right now. Big maybe about the future. But its a rounding error right now.
Having no interest in what Clubhouse is advertising to offer, I don't know that I've even seen a screenshot until reading TFA. And I'll admit that I probably don't run in the right circles anymore to judge the popularity of Clubhouse based on what my friends are doing.
So I'll ask: was Clubhouse ever all that popular? One doesn't need to be very cynical to understand why it started as invite-only. Were they able to leverage that FOMO into anything resembling a user base? Or is this just 2021's more complicated cousin to the Yo app[0], in that there's a bunch of hype up front but no real substance? TFA makes it sound like it's the app for narcissists and their hangers-on.
I used CH for a little while, but my CH experience was soon overrun by marketers, self-promoters and the wrong kind of cryptocurrency people (wrong kind = people who are only into cryptocurrency because they want to make $$$, and they will evangelize cryptocurrency for all the wrong reasons).
So I lost interest and stopped using it.
But it’s hard to tell from an experience like that, if it’s indicative of CH as a whole or if I just ended up in the wrong circles on CH.
Compare to Reddit for example, I subscribe to very specific subreddits that are about my interests and generally have good luck finding interesting things to read and to watch on Reddit. Whereas if all you ever saw was the front page of Reddit, you’d have a very different experience. So maybe CH is the same way, maybe there is some really good stuff I am missing out on, who knows. And maybe it’s all trash. Either way, I’m not inclined to spend any more time on CH in order to try and find something that may or may not exist. Chasing Nessie or Big Foot would be more productive use of my time :p
However, if someone told me about some actually good rooms then it’d be different and I’d be willing to check those out. So I’m not completely writing it off. Just saying, I’m not going to spend more time there on my own trying to find good rooms.
Yes, it’s absolutely the same. We host a ton of fascinating discussions all the time from orbital megastructures to cities on Venus and few people join us. Which is okay, we aren’t doing it for the numbers
Honestly I have the same doubts and still can't help but come to the conclusion that it wasn't much besides a very aggressive marketing campaign. It felt like every post about Clubhouse had that one person talking about how lifechanging and unique Clubhouse was supposed to be using variations of the same examples.
Also the period of many articles that tried to tell us about the massive success.
Given how extremely fast that fad died I can't help but come the conclusion that the Clubhouse hype was mostly artificial.
Shows how disconnected investors and tech news can be from reality. Seems to me like way more people talked about Clubhouse than actually used it.
The hype was mostly from building manufactured exclusivity. Influencers got invited and then made a big thing about it, people that chase influencer content desperately wanted to be in the app.
It's all just manufactured excitement. A new vehicle for influencers to pump content. If you're not an influencer, or not interested in listening to influencers, there's really nothing there for you.
I remember, a few years ago, the entire tech press being unabatedly abuzz about Bloom Energy. It confused me until I realized it was a press pool coördinated by Sequoia. The gushing about Clubhouse may be organic. But Andreessen Horowitz bet big on the company. They're one of the media savvier shops on Sand Hill.
This sort of media blitz happens way more than people know. Some are very good and subtle. But many are just 'out of the blue so and so is talking it up'. It is kind of the same game as spam. If you get enough out there and many still walk away you can sometimes get a bit of sticky and make money. It is a fascinating style of pump and dump.
I wish I could tell you, there is something to be said about 1) being live with no recording so records of dissent dont exist and 2) like the other commenter said slow government response
I suspect it's a lot of small things and social network multiplicative effect
So, this is an unencrypted (not end-to-end at least), intercept-ready chat network that was popular among (a) people with social status in the US, who might be of intelligence interest (sc. Elon Musk), and (b) people in a nation state that is definitely of interest to US intelligence? Is that right?
I like this analysis because it avoids the trap of passing judgment on or revealing contempt for the high status people in question. Instead it focuses on the system that was Clubhouse and how it functioned to reinforce the hierarchy from which high status individuals benefit.
I never understood Clubhouse’s obsession with preventing recordings. This is the main reason I left.
I had some great conversations with people on it. What I liked about Clubhouse was the serendipity of the conversations and the spontaneity.
If Clubhouse made it easy to record it would create a permanent stream of podcasts and YouTube audio recordings that would virally bring more and more people to the platform.
Instead of Clubhouse I use Zoom for my podcast interviews. Would have preferred Clubhouse. The Zoom setup is so straightforward. Meanwhile Clubhouse seems to be hostile to the idea.
If the recordings are distributed outside the app, there's no real reason to join Clubhouse, because all the 'good' content is no longer exclusive to Clubhouse. You wouldn't need to sign up with them if there's a good chance that the highlights of some important conversation will end up on Twitter in a day or two.
I would guess because the famous people felt they could say something that could ruin their image / brand? I have no idea. Most people when they know they are or could be recorded act very reserved for obvious reasons.
It's evolved beyond that definition to encompass people imitating the actions of others with the belief that those actions will grant them something. In this case, it's low status people thinking that hosting rooms and talking inanely will increase their status when the reality is those activities are merely ways to show status, not gain it.
Similarly, "cargo-culting" can be applied to a piece of code or script everyone copies and reuses without actually knowing how it works and then being confused when they've effectively built a wooden airplane and no goods have arrived.
This is true for literally any social media, Clubhouse is just an easy target given the UI doesn't have to be used for the primary content. I mean Facebook is awful for many reasons and yet you can still get utility out of it. I'm sure Clubhouse is no different. Easy to sit on the sidelines and focus on one aspect of it, though.
Facebook is much more about friends and family - there's status stuff on there too, but you can find Facebook useful without any interest in playing status games.
I don't think there are many people on Clubhouse who are using it to talk to have group audio conversations with their friends and family - that's what WhatsApp and suchlike are for.
Twitter is a bit more about status, but it also has a much stronger focus on niche interests. There are plenty of people I follow on Twitter who have low follower counts but consistently post interesting things about niche topics that I'm interested in.
> I don't think there are many people on Clubhouse who are using it to talk to have audio conversations with their friends and family - that's what WhatsApp and suchlike are for.
Did I miss something? What happened to the telephone? Been using that for audio conversations for quite a while and don’t have to be a part of privacy-compromising social media companies.
I remember reading an advice column where the author told a woman who was vexed that her children insisting on texting their friends instead of just calling them, "take solace in the fact that one day they'll likely be asking their own children, why don't you just text your friends?" I don't use apps like Whatsapp myself but it seems like they appeal to a lot of people for one reason or another.
Well, an American VC has millions of dollars tied up in this, so they have to keep promoting it as the "future of conversation" or some other vomit-worthy overly grandiose descriptor
I agree that this is a thing. I'm not sure its the thing. Clubhouse got a fast start with appearances but the likes of Musk, high interest content like the CEO of Robin Hood's appearing mid-gamestop craziness, etc. That, combined with the invite system meant that people were hearing about clubhouse and it gained reputation as the new exciting thing. Its now struggling to find a persistent place in the world. The former is remarkable, the latter is default.
"Mountains of shite" has never been a real problem for social media. Twitter, blogs, youtube and others all had this claim leveled against them. 99.9% is crap and no one cares. All cats and sandwiches. The absence of 0.1%, bad discovery systems and such have been problems. That said, the "minimum viable" discovery method is twitter.
Anyway... most successful social media thus far has either done it with home grown talent, like youtube, or being Twitter. Twitter requires very little commitment or effort, and is much better than facebook for famous people. Youtube eventually got youtubers... Twitch, Tiktok. IG is somewhere in between, with a lot of celebrity action but also IG-grown celebrities.
CEOs and celebrities are ok as boosters, but they're not going to be there daily. The equivalent of a youtuber will have to emerge for clubhouse for it to stick. Cargo cult...eh. stretch.
And yes. Ego, self promotion, a desire to be front and centre like Elon will play a big role. That goes without saying.
It's an interesting take but the phenomenon is obvious in other alternatives to Clubhouse. Like the Spotify backed Greenroom. I signed up and waltzed in because Clubhouse hadn't sent an invite yet. Got an eerie feeling listening in some rooms.
These apps can be a good supplement to likes of HAM radio for non-technical people but who knows what will become as things continue to ramp back up to being normal again for physical interactions.
This piece resonates a _lot_ with me. There are a few rooms that are utilitarian in nature though (shoot your shot dating rooms for instance), and some where the people being seen are definite experts and it's interesting. Agreed that people with status have generally been leaving though.
Lol I didn't think it was that bad with a whole status hierarchy. I thought it was just a bunch of chat channels like discord. It confirms my feeling that this is totally not for me.
I read this entire article and I still have absolutely no idea what it's talking about. What is clubhouse? I thought it was about the clubhouse music, but some of the comparisons were far too out there for music - so what is it then?
Once again, the only place I've ever even heard of this site Clubhouse is HN. As an early adopter of crypto the first rule of fight club is you don't talk about fight club. Many people didn't get the memo.
Talk about something and evangelize it, you're participating in a pyramid scheme or maybe your persona makes you a natural salesperson and shill for whatever the cause. Crypto(currency), OTOH, is something that through network effect and social media echo chambers has come to fruition - for better or for worse.
Let the market discover itself has been my mantra for 9 years, going back to G+ early days is when I promoted, shared, and prophesized about crypto. I came to the realization that any information shared runs against my personal goals to capitalize on markets.
The first time I mined crypto in 2011 I documented all the steps on my blog for Ubuntu 8 with all the AMD and opencl goodies. Eventually I 410'd the whole blog and decided "don't talk about it"
Another almost billionaire who doesn't tweet or join social audio apps. But I do read the commentary and according to sentiment, act accordingly.
A16Z seemingly thought simply by telling everyone how excited they were about Clubhouse they could turn Clubhouse into being something to be excited about. The problem being that the reality undermined them though - just as they were telling people to be excited about the innovative conversations on Clubhouse, the number one story was some CEO getting arsey about a journalist reporting the news- a fundamentally petty and narcissistic look for an App that needed to be seen as cool and new. So Elon and co did their "Oh look at us we're early adopters dance" but never invested in the platform - because there was never a reason to, and that failure to give a value proposition to the people they wanted to harvest value from was their core issue.