Comment by harryf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by harryf | Hacker News Reader

First time I went on Clubhouse, first got in a room with some Silicon Valley types talking about how to grow your startup. I get enough of that content so left to explore further and found a room with some African Americans discussing the best way to "snort crack from a booty hole". Perhaps it's my sense of humour but I laughed my head off and was immediately hooked. Felt like the Internet of the "good old days". Also I'm comfortable talking on voice from doing a podcast. Actually I usually hook up my Rødecaster Pro for better quality audio.

Some random tips I've found make Clubhouse more entertaining...

- Follow lots of people - don't be like Twitter, Instagram etc. trying to have more followers than follows. The more people you follow, the more diverse your room suggestions become

- From the home screen of the app, scroll down and find the little "Explore" button ... this will take you to more rooms. Smaller rooms tend to be lower down

- If you want to get involved in a discussion, go to the smaller rooms

- Can be interesting to tap on the profile of who "Nominated" someone... and keep tapping until you get to the center of the graph. This is an interesting take on social graphs I think (which I'm guessing they will disable)

- Most of all, get out of your comfort zone, when it comes to your normal interests / ethnicity etc. It's very low friction to talk to anyone and people are largely polite. It's a great to get to know groups of people you'd otherwise avoid and get new perspectives.

If you want to connect hit me up on @harryfcks in the app.

> Can be interesting to tap on the profile of who "Nominated" someone... and keep tapping until you get to the center of the graph.

Wow, this was fascinating. There was a weird dichotomy on mine. If I clicked on my straight, white, male friends, in almost every case the chain ended in just one or two clicks with an OG user.

If I clicked on anyone else (minority, women, etc), it was a long chain of people that usually involved a long string of black men and women.

My own chain was an exception, having been invited by a minority woman and going through that long chain of black men and women. Even though I'm friends with a bunch of those straight white guys with short chains. But I never asked for an invite when they were all advertising invites on Facebook. I only joined when my friend insisted and sent me an invite.

I don't know what any of that actually means, I just found it really interesting.

Is this signaling or what? What straussian message are you sending: don't accept invites? Sorry for the obtruse comment but feel lost.

The message is: I did this, and this is what I found.

I think you may be looking for something that isn't there.

reasonable thanks. You're probably right

Just checked. My chain is white guy invited by minority male invited by minority female, invited by minority female, invited by ...

Still not sure how this is relevant.

You're unsure about why social connections (in the form of invites) on a social network are relevant?

The artificial constraint of invites is relatively temporary and in the long run arguably potentially irrelevant.

Say we agree that in the short run, the "phenomenon" of clubhouse makes the artificial construction of "who's in the room" material and detrimental. Then the question to you is: who is harmed and to what extent?

This is perhaps a bit philosophical.

I found that if I went higher a few levels from me, the sideways, then everyone was either an internet marketer, some form of influencer, or startup “guru”.

Maybe it’s just my local graph, but it turned me off somewhat

How do you manage the notifications? I'm only following like 40 people but have change my notifications down to the lowest setting.

Even at infrequent, it notified me every 30 mins in the last 18 hours... while I was sleeping too. Just wild.

I don't use the notifications - have them disabled. I just dip in when I have time and see what's happening. May not be the best strategy but works for me.

Can be interesting to tap on the profile of who "Nominated" someone... and keep tapping until you get to the center of the graph. This is an interesting take on social graphs I think.

The first time I saw this kind of thing was on lobste.rs, where they call it the “user tree”: https://lobste.rs/u

On both Clubhouse and lobste.rs, surfacing the invite tree makes users more mindful of who they invite. To an extent, they’re vouching for that person, and can be held responsible if that person misbehaves.

Does anyone know what social network first exposed invite trees? I assume it can’t have originated recently with lobste.rs.

Plenty of p2p communities have been doing something similar for years. If you invite someone to the forum, and they get banned, you get banned too... or at least have your privileges revoked for some time.

Torrent sites have been doing invite trees for a long time. The oldest I personally remember was OiNK (2004).

it sounds like audio only version of chatroulette.

I guess so but that it’s groups not 1-on-1 probably means people behave better. Also video is a higher barrier entry in terms of awkwardness etc

except chatroulette was random and didn't really have user accounts?

Unless chatroulette became something different than the video window 1:1 with random people and usually phallic symbols... did I miss something?

Very very different from chatroulette, in my opinion.

not sure why their race matters

It doesn’t it’s just that for me, living in Zürich Switzerland, it’s a type of conversation I would never get to hear / be part of

I'll give my thoughts. Although the wording seems clunky at first, the GP is actually identifying something really important about the growth of Clubhouse as a platform. Similar to Twitter, which has Black Twitter [0], Latino Twitter, etc, it seems that Clubhouse will also build these kinds of communities.

When a chief concern about Clubhouse is lack of diversity, I think this is pretty meaningful. What I'm more interested in seeing though, is if Clubhouse can also incorporate class diversity without betraying its brand of exclusivity.

Note: I'm not on Clubhouse and don't want to be.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Twitter

It doesn't, in and of itself. Here it's a proxy for a certain social or cultural group.

To me it's interesting because it seems to reflect how innovation in things like music tends to migrate from ethnic African groups to the white middle class.

Please consider that there is a world outside of the US. This dismissive attitude towards the rest of the world is what makes the way of living of a lot (actual billions) of people get excluded when US companies create things.

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