Facebook Is Said to Be Building a Product to Compete with Clubhouse

Clubhouse's tech is so simple it could be built in a few days, the thing they figured out is how to get a clubhouse feel by having a bunch tech celebrities on their platform. It's like a secret society of people who get together in their "clubhouse" and talk about #TOPIC.

Facebook will fail, because it'll be open to all, and no one wants that.

It's really disappointing that big tech companies can get away with stealing others' ideas. It's a gap in our governance system, whereby patents don't protect this type of intellectual innovation. Even if it did, the smaller companies have no practical way to go after big companies. They can't afford prolonged legal battles, and the "defensive" patent portfolios these big companies amass really allow them to bully small companies into submission, often using frivolous patents. The intellectual property system has been flipped upside-down with the opposite of the incentives we wanted out of it, and it more closely just resembles regulatory capture.

Mind you, I'm not saying Clubhouse has invented some new core technology. It's more like the value they have identified, via a smart product or business, is now something someone with greater capital and resources can simply exploit. The rewards aren't going to the innovator who identified that value.

If I were Paul & Rohan, I wouldn't be concerned about this, or Twitter Spaces, or any of that.

Scale is an advantage, but also a massive disadvantage when trying to launch a product like this. Clubhouse has gotten to work out the kinks and scale things like trust & safety and room moderation little by little, and flesh out the exact things necessary to achieve product-market fit.

Facebook and Twitter are going to have to figure out how the hell to handle all the trust and safety issues for audio at billion user scale, before they can even launch the product (IF they ever actually do). They also have to figure out how to jam it in to their product line, another non-trivial problem (how many people even visit the Reels tab on instagram, or know it exists?).

Case in point, remember Facebook Dating? I don't.

I mean this shouldn't be news. Facebook is a social media company. Given their size they should be developing a competitor regardless of success or failure to hedge their business.

The telephone? the conference call?

Isn't Clubhouse the new Quora? Fun while they have access to SV VIPs, but doesn't scale?

Considering where Clubhouse is right now, FB product will be much better & more sophisticated.