An audio app that has consumed my life | Hacker News Reader

An audio app that has consumed my life

divinations.substack.com

108 pointsdshipper60 comments

I didn’t have the patience to read all the way through this article. Something about the writing really drove me crazy. I just want a basic explanation of what this is. This TechCrunch article gets to the point much more quickly. https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/18/clubhouse-app-chat-rooms/

It's a very basic version of IRC but for audio, and only for invitees for now.

And it's great for all the reasons IRC is great, but everyone thinks it's all a totally new concept so they're just waiting for it to get its unicorn horn and start pissing cash money.

You're not the only one who the writing drove crazy!

Really curious to know. Is it because of the conversational tone or the click-baity suspense?

The article is almost half done before it begins to explain the basic mechanics of the service, and I still didn't really get it until I read elsewhere. If it was easy for anyone to sign up and/or it had been around for a while, that might be OK, but given that it's not, a sentence or two to tell the reader WTF you're writing about would be helpful.

TechCrunch explains it succinctly in the second paragraph: "The most buzzy of these startups is Clubhouse, an audio-based social network where people can spontaneously jump into voice chat rooms together. You see the unlabeled rooms of all the people you follow, and you can join to talk or just listen along, milling around to find what interests you."

Hey! I wrote this article. There is literally a description of the basic mechanics of the app starting at word 48 of the piece. I have no clue how you missed this!

> "After we exchanged pleasantries, Paul explained how the app works. There’s one global “room,” and when you join you start off on mute, but anyone can unmute themselves. When you open the app, it sends push notifications to everyone on the app, so they can join you and chat if they’re free."

I'm curious why this didn't work for you and what you would have wanted instead?

This sounds kinda fun! One of the most unique apps I ever used had a similar concept. It was called "Wakie: The Social Alarm Clock" and the concept was simple you would set a time you wanted to be woken up and at that time you would receive a phone call from a random other user of the app (likely from another country due to time zones!) and you could also volunteer to wake people. The call would be ended after 60 seconds. These were probably my first experiences talking to someone from another country. The app still exists but has pivoted to something else.

Wow, that sounds so diabolically creepy I have no idea who would ever sign up to be called on the phone, by strangers, while sleeping.

Those with a sense of adventure, I presume

Clickbait title. The app is called “Clubhouse” and it’s a way of meeting new people. It’s invite only.

Interesting post, though.

There is already and iOS app called Clubhouse that is not the app this article wrote about.

How is that relevant?

I think so that people don't rush to App Store to download "Clubhouse" app and then wonder what the hell the fuss is all about.

Companies in different verticals frequently share names.

"Second, and more importantly, on Clubhouse you can meet great people."

I didn't make it much further than this. The article didn't make it clear as to why its users were more "great".

easy enough for an invite-only app to fill itself with people that mostly think the other insiders are "great" too

That is true, but it's also been my experience that better discussion happens in smaller forums. Whether that's usenet, reddit, or HN, when it's new, you feel like you're speaking to a small group of people vs. shouting in a large room.

The quality of discussion on HN have dropped over time and a large part of that feels like that with more people trying to get their opinions heard, there's a lot of interesting opinions that are missed. Just look at the difference in upvotes between early posts and later mid-thread discussions, if you use that as a proxy for readership, there's a lot less people engaged because conversations get harder to follow and it's not easy to identify conversations that are new to you.

The article drops some names and, I guess, expects you to have heard of them. I have heard of Namal, so that is an instant indicator to me what they mean in this case by 'great'.

I'm not sure that I buy the 'this will scale when floodgates are open' follow up though. Although with the recent 'famous person goes live on Facebook and interacts with fans', it might work!

I briefly worked on HuffPost Live, which was basically like this, but with a single stream of content. There were hosts and programming, but at any time, guests could audition to join a conversation. The dynamism of having guests of all levels of expertise on a topic was really compelling. I still feel like the project was ahead of its time. It also didn't have the elitism aspect for gaining access.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HuffPost_Live

"...that has consumed my life" - is that supposed to make me _want_ to use it?

Right?! But I'm personally intrigued by apps that I will never use, let alone "consume my life" because I believe it's important to stay abreast of the pop culture consumer tech trends...

"You don’t have to schedule a conversation or reach out to anyone and ask if they want to chat, you just open the app and start talking."

Sounds like another app appealing to the lowest common denominator: 'hey everyone, look at/listen to me!'

I thought this was going to be a post written from the perspective of the developer of a music app, like audio processing or something. I’m a lot more interested in having an app I develop consume my life!

I was secretly hoping for it to be GarageBand, which I only discovered a few weeks ago after apparently having it on my phone for several years now. It's a fantastic little app that does things I couldn't have dreamt of ten years ago. I've been writing pieces of songs, which is something (at 41) I've never done before.

But no, this is basically chat roulette 2020.

Garageband for iOS is absolutely amazing. It is simply the best app there ever was, besides browsers and the basics.

As a guitar player since a kid I LOVE touch guitar, bass, the the drums, everything and especially the fact that it's not just an instrument but a song studio. I couldn't say enough good things about GarageBand for iOS. It's amazing. I have hundreds of diverse song snippets since 2010.

ChatRoulette! Ha. You're so right.

>a community for casual drop-in audio conversations

That there are people to whom this is appealing is interesting. For me personally this sounds like the tenth circle of hell.

It feels very culture dependent to me, and almost certainly to become a dumpster fire once/if it develops mass appeal.

Could it be cool? Yea - if people are respectful, curious and - somewhat - open/trusting. It probably won’t be/stay like that though.

Edit: I grew up in a small rural community. People still remember the open party line telephone system. There was a cultural “etiquette” about using it because you had preexisting relationships with those people (however distant). A conversation app needs to have a limiting feature: geographic, contact list, etc.

was looking for someone mentioning the 'party line' thing. I've heard ppl like yourself mention remembering that also.

It seems more like a platform for call-in talk radio style podcasts.

This angle is interesting insofar as the business prop/value potential.

We've nearly completely detached ourselves from live-anything these days, with the exception of sports. It will be interesting to see if people want to migrate back to a real-time broadcast. If the host/content was compelling enough, it could work.

But 99.99% of podcasts are not that.

Seriously? You know Twitch is a massive thing, right? Game streaming is already a billion-dollar industry, not to mention all the non-gaming live content like mukbangs.

Seriously, conference calls? I thought that sounded cool in 1992 and it turns out I was wrong.

> If this was a podcast, I would think “hey that’s interesting, maybe I’ll listen later.” I would probably read the episode title and show notes, and I would consider whether the topics were interesting to me, and maybe I’d listen, or maybe I would save it for later.

> But with Clubhouse, the conversation is live, and there are no recordings. And when I join they might notice me. So when I got that push notification, I knew: it’s now or never. I had no clue what they were talking about. I was either in or out.

So, apart from the novelty and true potential use-cases, this works out of FOMO? I do have enough FOMO right now with RSS, Youtube, Reddit and Hacker News, I don't really find this appealing.

Clubhouse marketing campaign

Inside the clickbait marketing campaign that has consumed my job.

"All of a sudden, I’m explaining my dinky blog post to a guy with almost a million twitter followers!"

OK, so it's the usual app: please let me be famous for 5 minutes because one of my God is talking to me. Facebook did it long before...

"I think it’ll feel similar to Twitter, in a lot of ways. Sometimes a famous person retweets you or replies to you. More often, a “famous in your world” person does."

Enough... I'm definetly ouf of this

How much of this is related to shelter-in-place?

That was a very long advert.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

It was very long, but it wasn't all an advertisement. He spent a good deal of time talking about the potential prospects of the app, issues it may encounter (even with some suggestions), and similar apps that have come up in the past that didn't quite make the cut. That's a lot more in-depth than most product reviews go.

Long form "in-depth" advertisement is a thing.

May God bless your perceived(?) innocence.

I honestly think the wiki entry on the French Revolution(s) is shorter or similar length.

But hey, if you’re that brilliant of a writer, have at it and write about a web app to your hearts content. Never edit anything.

https://clubhouse.io/

If I were them I'd be slightly pissed off.

Why? The products aren't similar.

Emphasis on slightly, however they're both startups with software products with the same name, even if those products do different things.

Whenever I come up with a new product and choose a name, I try to conduct due diligence first to see if there's any other software companies with the same name. It seems like they didn't do that, or if they did they didn't care.

On the other hand, maybe the newer Clubhouse drives more traffic to the established one, who knows.

I'm on clubhouse for a while.

I see some people calling this article a marketing campaign. I must admit that I spend a lot of time on Clubhouse. Since I joined my usage of Twitter and other networks dropped significantly [0].

It's hard to explain what makes Clubhouse so unique and addictive, but it reminds me the early days of Twitter when conversations were more honest and more serendipitous [1].

I'm curious to see how the team will handle the growth. Being closed with a small tight group of people that are loosely connected in the real world makes it quite special.

[0] https://twitter.com/synopsi/status/1253916397811273728?s=20

[1] https://twitter.com/synopsi/status/1252431014183354369?s=20

What about discord voice chat ?

What about two tin cans connected by a string?

If you don't have a second can you can just create a loopback interface to transmit locally.

I'd rather have 2 tin cans filled with rice and beans right now. Useful during lockdown.

And Virtual Airwaves

https://virtualairwaves.com/

if it's a badly written article that many aren't finding informative, stop upvoting it! Here's the other techcrunch article ppl mentioned, posted a week ago and not garnering much interest. heh

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22913692

Cool. I had an idea like this a while back (as a dev I know exactly what ideas are worth) where I would finally learn Elixir and LiveView by building something similar but more like a CB network where you could only connect with people within a certain distance of you. The level of effort and the possibility for trolling left it on the shelf though.

I hate to ask, but does anyone have a clubhouse invite?

I can hook you up if you email me.

Sorry, gotta withdraw this offer — got too many emails about it.

Now I’m curious for an invite

The app seems compelling but not something I’d likely use much. I’ve noticed this lowkey buzz for Roam building. While I respect their approach and agree with some core concepts, I feel like the implementation is not ideal for the types of notes I, and many others, take. If anyone’s interested in a new note app we are building, PM me for access to the alpha. We are launching the beta in May but would appreciate feedback in the meantime!

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