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Comment by nstart | Hacker News Reader

This seems like an ok time to point to Shaan's twitter thread on why he believes clubhouse will fail [1]. Nothing is guaranteed of course, but it is an entertaining read. It's designed to be a bit over the top, silicon valley esque story style. But the person who wrote it, is writing from their experience of actually launching, and burning out in an attempt to build a similar company which makes the thread that much more interesting.

In any case, it surprises me that Clubhouse is staying in closed mode for so long knowing that the bigger social networks are coming for them, especially Twitter which is where I see the most number of people talking about Clubhouse.

[1] https://twitter.com/ShaanVP/status/1371972261004070913

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I think Clubhouse is making a big mistake if they don't sell out to a bigger player. It's like the Steve Jobs quote to Dropbox about how what they have is a feature, not a product. What Clubhouse offers should be built into a broader social network since it clearly can't survive on independently for the reasons Shaan mentions.

Discord is already launching "Stages" which aims to replicate Clubhouse's main selling point. And I'm sure Twitter, Facebook, and Microsoft are gunning for them too. I have trouble seeing how they survive.

Except Dropbox succeeded as a separate company by most reasonable metrics.

The Jobs offer was $1B IIRC; they’ve got a $12B market cap and some reasonable ROI far beyond the acquisition offer by now (remember even the IPO investors - non-retail - bought in at $21).

Whether the total ROI exceeds the growth / rate of return in AAPL stock during that time, well, maybe not? But it would have been a cash transaction...

Jobs offered to buy them in 2009 when AAPL stock was around $5 a share (obviously a lot of splits happened), compared to today's price of over $120 so that $1B in stock would be around $25B, more than double Dropbox market cap

But like I said, it would have almost certainly been a cash transaction, right? So yeah, engineers who were retained would have done better with their AAPL stock grants, but that’s not really the measure to compare is it?

By that logic most companies should have dissolved and simply bought AAPL shares with their proceeds (I mean that’s true up to some limit but it falls apart in some macroeconomic sense obviously).

Dropbox also evolved into something more than what it was at the time of Steve's quote right?

I feel like both Steve can have been right, and Dropbox successful because it chose to do more than just be a feature.

Yeah, "live audio" is going to be the next "Stories" feature.

Couldn't agree more. Not only is it a feature, not a product, but it's a niche feature at that. The vast majority of people I know who have used Clubhouse find it fascinating at first and then within a day or two realize it's mostly boring content and never touch it again.

CH gathers users' contacts lists probably in an attempt to increase its valuation in the market. If you can clone CH but don't have the same data about users, it makes sense to just buy CH.

I don't like CH because I don't like anything that only caters to "elites" and select groups. IMO, that goes against the very purpose of the Internet.

Closed mode is the reason it was so hyped over last months. Arguably the ONLY reason, but that's debatable. I'm pretty sure that multiuser audio only applications weren't invented in 2020.

From the linked thread:

> When a user opens an app (IG, youtube, TikTok) they need juicy content within 7 seconds (or they bounce). This is the "Interesting-ness" problem.

> Those other apps (IG, Tiktok etc.) have millions of pieces of content to choose from. So their algorithms get really really good at finding juicy content for you right away. But clubhouse is LIVE. So you need something INTERESTING that's ALSO happening RIGHT NOW.

> multiplying "content is interesting" and "content is live" doesn't just make the problem 2x harder..it makes it 200x harder.

The interesting thing is that Twitter Spaces solves all of this organically. No interesting Space content? Well, you were already there to scroll through your feed, so you can get your dopamine hit just by doing that anyways. Notifications can take advantage of your entire interest graph, not just your contact list and Clubhouse-specific opt-ins.

I've spent significant time in Twitter Spaces. The UX is practically identical. Panel discussions are equally professional. There's naturally going to be more professional content because people can justify spending time to build a Twitter following WAY more than they can justify spending time to build a Clubhouse following. When Twitter launched Fleets I thought it was a massive waste of screen real estate having them as a position:sticky-esque element, but Spaces live there as well, and it flips the equation on its head: you want to stay up-to-date with the spaces that are going on at any time, so it makes total sense for spaces to be top-of-screen and top-of-mind.

And while there may be some who are afraid of linking their Twitter presence to the frank thoughts they might want to share... Clubhouse IMO is even worse on this, because the insistence on real identities prevents an entire class of pseudonymous discussion from happening, and it's only a place people can feel safe to say controversial things while it's a relatively small invite-only community, which works counter to the growth trend. Not to mention opening to pseudonymous accounts enables voice-only acting as fictional characters, which will democratize the Virtual Youtuber trend in a huge way.

Assuming Twitter can stick to an April release, I fear Clubhouse will be spoken of with the same historical reverence we use for Digg, and the same meteoric two-year lifespan of Pets.com.

I too am interested in Twitter's April launch. It feels like a lot of clubhouse buzz is centered around twitter. Maybe it's twitter's turn to find success in integrating another company's idea into their product

I think that it's closed so that you are forced to receive an invitation to join, and to send an invitation you have to give the app access to your phone's contacts (at least on iOS when I looked at it, quickly uninstalled). There were a number of dark patterns utilized to try and get elevated permissions and access to contacts.

> [...] it is an entertaining read

The exact opposite for me. Their points are interesting, but to me the format just felt like a very poor attempt at creative writing. The first ~10 tweets convey absolutely no useful information. They only "set the scene".

I can see how others do find it entertaining though.

Completely agree. All the extraneous fluff was a huge distraction vs just distilling his points down to half the amount of tweets.

17.2k jealous people on Shaan's tweet.

Or maybe they just find Clubhouse ridiculous and are tired of hearing about it? The tweet is amusing if nothing else, I wouldn't suspect the people liking it are jealous of anything.

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