Clubhouse – An audio-based social media app | Hacker News Reader

Clubhouse – An audio-based social media app

joinclubhouse.com

11 pointskomape15 comments

I seem to be in the minority, but I have to say so far I have been pretty unimpressed by Clubhouse so far. The app itself is very well done, but the rooms/conversations are rarely interesting. There’s a lot of:

- random tech related discussions (cryptocurrency shilling; daily tech recaps)

- random life/dating topics like “are you okay with your man cheating”

- money chasing rooms that feel scam/spam-y (“entrepreneurs only $$$”, “how much do you want to be a millionaire”, etc)

Maybe it’s just my personality but the above, despite not being interesting to me, is also just not well suited for audio — who has time to listen to this for hours?

That said, I have seen glimpses of something more unique and compelling. Two of the more interesting rooms I have seen are:

- there was an article recently about a journalist who fell in love and started dating infamous pharma-bro Martin Shkreli. She was getting dunked on all day in twitter and showed up that night in Clubhouse and answered questions and explained the story from her own perspective

- Chesa, the SF DA that all of SF tech twitter seems to hate, was on a few nights ago debating some of these well known tech people about the crime situation in SF

Both of those were timely topics where you could instantly form a room/discussion and have a more respectful conversation and dive deeper into what happened than you could on Twitter.

It will be interesting to see how the platform evolves as it continues to open up.

I received an invite and didn't bother to sign up for a while until a friend asked me for an invite. So my first impressions are:

- available only on iOS

- I had to upload all my contacts. I saw how many friends of my friends are on the platform which was questionable.

- there are a few profiles with 500k+ followers that almost every user follows.

- currently for me at least it's founders and VCs echo chamber but I think it could be quite interesting if it becomes more diverse in terms of topics.

I have been trying to get into Clubhouse for a while. Can't wait for it to open up more invites. Of course, it will be interesting to see if it is able to maintain the quality of discussion as more people join the platform or whether it will also be marred by the issues facing Twitter and Facebook.

Clubhouse is going nuts on my German Twitter bubble. Even some high rank politicans opened up accounts. But what is the difference between Clubhouse and an old fashioned skype meeting without video?

What's social about a closed system only available on iphone?

What’s social about a party? It’s a closed system only available to friends of one person.

Indeed, that is a party not a 'social media app'.

I think this might be a potential way to "slow down" viral misinformation prevelant on other forms of social media

Does anyone have a clubhouse invite to spare? I want to dive in and taste the app interface.

> Hey, we’re still in private beta but are working hard to open things up soon!

still in private beta, sure it is. This is nothing more than a premium echo chamber full of VCs and celebrities pumping the valuation of another worthless social network.

The whole value is lost as soon as it is opened up to everyone. Similar to Instagram in its early days but not for us plebians.

I got an invitation recently.

I have been pleasantly surprised at the quality of what I have come across so far.

Basically it’s a bunch of facilitated discussion groups, with scheduling and directory services.

It feels like a bunch of radio phone ins. You can either listen or participate.

Will it scale? I really don’t know, and it is plausible to me that they need to rate limit scaling so that they can build the features that turn out to be necessary.

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What's the business model? I don't see a payment form anywhere.

If this is going to be funded by "growth and engagement" then it will have the same issues as the current social media platforms, so why bother with this over, let's say, Facebook?

Not sure yet, but every weekend they do a "town hall" where the two founders are pretty open about their thinking about the future of the product, and invite users to discuss it.

I get the impression from hearing them that they'll be incredibly thoughtful about monetization.

WhatsApp's founders were also "thoughtful", going as far as making Facebook promise to not do bad things with it (though we all know how this went).

This "thoughtfulness" is meaningless in the best of worlds when money (and duties regarding their investors/shareholders) is involved but even more so when it comes from some Silicon Valley tech-bros that would be the first to jump on the opportunity to sell out to Facebook or its future equivalent (remember that FB's reputation wasn't as bad when the WhatsApp takeover occurred).

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