Clubhouse Bio Generator
perchance.org
perchance.org
Also, I'm either too out of the loop to get it, or just a bad user because I honestly have no idea how to use Clubhouse. Any room I join I can't talk in. There's no way to contribute to discussion. On top of that, most rooms have 100s or even 1000s of people in them. I don't get what this app is, or how it's supposed to work.
Even the musk interview with the Robhinhood guy wasn't that good. Would have been much better as an actual thought out podcast.
I have followed people who I find interesting and groups that align to my interests - but the loudest figurative voices are still the ones who pop my notifications most often. Frustrating, but I’m going to keep at it through February at least.
I’ve also had to rebrand it in my mind, it’s not social media. It’s more like community talkback radio and has found a niche in my listening habits where I’ve given up a few hours a week in podcasts to listen in on some wacky chats.
I just opened the app again and scrolled for maybe 45 seconds. Not a single thing of interest to me.
I wasn't in super-early Twitter, but early Twitter was not at all like that. What I saw was that relationships and followings made on blogs translated to Twitter, and most of the movement was organic. I don't think at that point people thought of becoming an "influencer" like the ones we have now, so Twitter didn't attract those types too much. It was also far, far easier to participate, it was way more welcoming than it is now.
It was also less open, in the sense that Twitter didn't recommend you what was popular to keep engagement up like they do now. Back then you wouldn't see too much content outside of your network, retweets were manual and likes (favorites then) didn't show up in your timeline. So you only saw what the people you followed actively wanted you to see. That meant that these accounts made just to sell you things and scam you couldn't reach too far, as people didn't actively share their content. So content that gets attention now in Clubhouse wouldn't be popular in early Twitter.
Recommendation algorithms and engagement metrics have just completely ruined social media...
I’ve noticed a trend on Clubhouse. I think it’s a new marketing gimmick. I’ve noticed these types of rooms that have celebrities in them. The celebrities never say anything, they’re just there, but it gets 1000s of people to join the room. One I noticed was talking about “climate change” that has Brad Pitt in the room...but it’s literally a YC company pitching to investors, everyone aside from Brad Pitt is either at this YC company, or an investor, Brad doesn’t say a word.
So the scam is this. Find a celebrity. Get them in a room. Pay them some fee to just stay on the line. This in turn funnels 1000s of people into the room because they see a room with “major celebrity” and then the scammers shill their scam to 1000+ people.
Obtaining a second Clubhouse invite to use for your fake celebrity would surely be cheaper than paying the real one.
Once you have a ring of fake celebrity profiles you can even resell the service to others.
I've been on it since early December and I've seen it become gradually more and more focused on marketing, cryptocurrency, and how to become a millionaire.
Maybe it's also a result of different communities coming to the platform as invites spread.
Anyways, how I've seen it change just in the last few months is that it seems that people are using it in a less exploratory and more promotional way, a less flexible and more focused way.
But that's clearly just what I've seen, I'm curious how other people have seen it evolve since last April or so.
I got on last summer and it worked better in the smaller "club house" style
its just a fireside chat app, or "live podcasting" or whatever
some utility for some
but even back last summer, people had these cringy "I'm a millionaire like everyone else" bio, that didn't make any sense then and doesn't make any sense now
I do suspect for people that enjoy talk-radio style podcasts might enjoy CH more since it's live. If CH can land a big name podcaster, maybe not a Rogan level, but someone big enough, they could start to chip away at podcasts.
CH also let's you do something these other platforms don't: see who is listening with you. I was in a room last night with Chris Voss on stage talking about negotiation skills and saw Eric Stonestreet, one of the actors from Modern Family, in the audience. Also just connecting with other people in the audience, adding them on Twitter and sometimes even starting conversations about the conversation we heard.
There are some people that use it as a discord server while they are playing games - I mean what discord's original differentiating quality was: external team chat.
People are drawn to its discovery and interactivity system. Even if ultimately both of those buckle under a crowd so as to be useless, in their current forms.
What made early CH felt like the early internet is that none of the early users did that, they had IRL jobs and other platforms to voice their value.
If so, maybe it's just a matter of time before those recommendations are eliminated for you.
If not, well, I think that's the problem. It's probably too soon (not enough data) for CH to make good recommendations without active input from users.
It seems like if you’ve ever even opened a room that is tagged “investing” you’re now in the vicious cycle of having scam millionaire content spammed to your feed. It doesn’t help that Clubhouse only shows like 3 rooms before you have to click a button to see more. Compared to YouTube where on almost any page there are 20+ videos that are recommended to me at any time. Clubhouse has very low information density.
The concept of clubhouse is interesting. Live podcasting is a neat idea that could work. But it’s hard to see how CH is achieving this right now.
Clubhouse doesn’t do anything all that innovative (what can it do that Discord can’t?) and the pitch isn’t even that unique. The key to success was that they got the right VCs. Those VCs use it, get their friends to use it, pull some strings to get celebrities to pop in. It becomes successful but in this really weird way where once you scratch beneath the surface there’s not actually anything there. I think that’s why there’s so much weird grifty content on there.
But hey, it’ll do more than well enough I’m sure. Probably not well enough to go public but it’ll get bought out by [insert name of FAANG here] and everyone will walk away with a tidy profit.
(Purely anecodotal of course, but none of my "normie" friends have mentioned Clubhouse to me once. During the pandemic a lot of the having been using Houseparty. It's a lot of fun. But I rarely see it mentioned on HN. I suspect part of the reason is that it was already sold in 2019 to Epic Games, so no-one is trying to aggressively hype it up any more)
Anyway, I honestly don’t hate clubhouse the app. I hate a lot of the bullshit content it shows me, but hey, maybe they’ll figure it out.
I will say, there is something artificial about the user base of CH. it doesn’t feel organic. I think this gets to your point about getting the right people with the right network on the app. There aren’t any actually _new_ interesting people. It’s people you already know about. People you’ve been reading about (if you’re in startup culture) for years.
Did you mean navel-gazing or are you referring to Naval Ravikant? This is a sincere question, since I gather he's pretty active on CH.
Facebook is apparently building a ClubHouse competitor
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/10/technology/facebook-build...
https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/17/22187490/twitter-spaces-...
That said, social media doesn't have to be innovative to be a good business, it just has to be slightly different, attract a core base who in turn attract their network who build loyalty. Like snapchat > instagram stories > tiktok
I used to feel this way about Twitter, Instagram, etc: basically every post-Facebook social network that fundamentally implemented a subset of Facebook functionality.
I eventually came around to the notion that the initial conditions of a social network are incredibly important for establishing the community and its norms, which is where most of the value resides. The norms[1] governing what one posts about, the type of people you expect to find, even the Overton Window of what's expressible on a network without getting downvoted/harassed/suspended all depend on these conditions. "This functionality already exists in product Y" becomes more or less irrelevant to the future success of a social media service, and more importantly, only narrowly relevant to its utility.
[1] these may differ from subculture to subculture but exist at least locally
Us technologists tend to think the best product is the one which everyone uses. Thats wrong. The best product is the one which connects you to a tribe. (Which is never 'everyone' by definition.) And then makes you feel seen for who you are. (Which will almost never happen in crowded room of strangers.)
Young people think facebook is for old people, because their parents are on the site. You could probably take facebook, change nothing about the site except for the theme and name (so its not associated with old people anymore). Start with a new, empty database of users and with the right marketing a new generation would fall in love with it again. Once the features are good enough, culture and image is everything.
As icing on the cake, you need phone number verification to sign up, something that in an increasing number of countries is practically impossible and maybe even prohibited to get without having it tied to your personal name, address and government ID.
I got several invites to it but no way am I going to be part of the growth of what I consider harmful. They could have done something great here, but it seems it's just a VC grab for money, influence, user data and market share.
I hope they either do a hard pivot or that the service dies in a fire.
Artificial scarcity, exclusivity and FOMO are the entire value proposition of clubhouse (and crypto to a large degree). It's a digital nightclub. There is no other reason why in the year 2021 when Elon Musk gives a talk only 5k people can listen in a 'room'.
And yes it is ironic, and deeply depressing that the internet, where we can theoretically send stuff for free at virtually zero-cost, is segmented exactly like the real world. But it makes sense if you look at it like zero-sum spaces where people fight for attention and resources with very little intrinsic value creation.
https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/against-waldenponding
I highly recommend reading both.
Just yesterday I saw a tweet from a Bitcoin grifter (he even wrote a book about it) saying Bill Gates is evil because he wants us to reduce dependency on hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons underpin the centralised grid while renewables introduced the concept of a distributed grid. The cognitive dissonance is telling.
But at least for some of those ideas it's clear that they'd have a far greater shot at success if they opened up and created something that allowed more benefits to flow to potential partners, and even to potential competitors, because it'd increase their chance of being the new standard in $field. They might end up with a smaller market share, but of a much larger market.
I'm not saying that will work for everyone, because it won't. But it seems people way too rarely consider if that's even a possibility, because they're from the start putting effort into preventing a decentralised model from working. Then, after they've ruled out a decentralised solution, a whole lot of them add "blockchain" to their pitchdeck after having made blockchain totally pointless by introducing a centralised authority... Sometimes I just want to lock some of these founders in a room and ask them "why?" over and over.
Its usually fun (for me) but I never get any good answers. It feels like arguing about the existence of god with believers. My working theory is that young technologists get into blockchain because it seems cool, and its something bigger than themselves to care about. Before long they have lots of friends who are believers too, and asking hard technical questions feels like a threat to their community. So they don't ask, and instead spend years working on technology thats an obvious dead end. (Which isn't to say everything in the field is useless; but about 90% of it almost certainly is.)
I think we will see some fantastic uses of blockchain eventually, but I worry a very substantial proportion of the people pitching blockchain based ideas today don't even understand that they're missing the point themselves or know they've compromised everything but don't dare pitch the uncompromising decentralised vision.
Edit: for anyone who's not aware of the nature of his rooms, I found the "should women allowed to own bitcoin" recording on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bysynpT93yg
But mostly what you said.
[number]X [adj] [job] Working on the intersection of [field] and [field] [action] [celebrity] [location] once [field]/[field]/[field] [moti1] [moti2] [moti3] that drive [moti4] Currently reading - [movement] [field] [quote]
To me, this category seems proof that the clubhouse social network model has demands outside of stonks and hustle culture. In fact, if clubhouse was to bring in more varied creators, I wonder if luring away streamers from twitch to clubhouse will be a viable strategy in the future. It even comes with monetisation strategies built in (tips and subscriptions and possibly pay to ask questions just like twitch).
i.e. "Working on the intersection of bitcoin and bitcoin"
thank you for making this
I keep hearing good things about the conversations that are happening, but I’ve been on the wait list for months, and I’m not in the clique