Clubhouse Payments | Hacker News Reader

Clubhouse Payments

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180 pointstosh227 comments

> 100% of the payment will go to the creator ... Clubhouse will take nothing.

Well imagine if they had an Android app in the first place or earlier right before all the big players started copying them, then it would have been attractive to the users. Right now, what is the point if the invite system is still there.

Another platform can just announce the same thing and they are back to square zero.

> We are excited to see how people use it, and to continue working hard to help the amazing members of the Clubhouse community grow and thrive.

Yet, with no Android app and an increasing amount of competitors copying the hell out of Clubhouse, I can only see this going in the way of Meerkat, Yik Yak and Periscope. (By being shut down)

How do apps like this survive and grow?

Giants can clone the entire product with a small team.

I'm worried about this exact problem.

Edit: First thought that comes to mind is filing a few patents and then throwing 50% of funding into a lawsuit against the first giant to clone you.

This is traditionally not the way, but with the incumbents so nimble and readily able to pick off good ideas, it seems like it might be the only defense.

Giants will clone and make a piece of shit. Apps like this survive by creating a network of people. They do that by creating demand to join the service. How do you do that? Make it invite only, and invite a ton of high profile people and get them using and talking about it, creating FOMO.

The only people who threaten this are Facebook and Twitter. Twitter _actually_ could clone it or buy a competitor. But, look at Twitter’s history of that. They literally KILLED a TikTok by buying it and shutting it down. They are in the process of killing a live video competitor to twitch and youtube called periscope.

Don’t be afraid of The Big Bois.

> Giants will clone and make a piece of shit.

Facebook does a damn good job of sinking ships.

The only two survivors I can think of are TikTok and Snapchat. And Snapchat pivoted.

Serious question, what did snap chat pivot to?

I would like to know too. Snapchat was ephermerial messages, stories, and filters? Tik tok is reels?

They made glasses with a camera in them

What did Snapchat pivot to? The only pivot I know they did was changing from disappearing messages to stories (not sure if the disappearing messages are still there?). But this wasn't exactly a pivot as far as I know because of FB copying the stories feature afterwards.

my intuition on FB agrees with you but I can’t think of something like clubhouse that they didn’t buy or attempt to? any particular ships you’re referring to?

the ones you’re referring to were social photo/video plays which FB was perfectly setup to enter. FB doesn’t have an audio product as far as i know.

Their IP is the high caliber of people/creators/cult/tribes that has amassed and been refined. But clearly not their UX...yet.

What would they patent exactly? Group voice chat? I imagine someone patented that decades ago and if anything, Clubhouse will be licensing or fighting patent trolls soon if they aren't already.

The way they do moderated group chat. It isn't just a giant chat room.

>Giants can clone the entire product with a small team

Giants are more likely to buy the entire project with a small amount of shares

Neither option is likely to turn out well, but at least the founders could be rewarded

Android app is coming out in a few days ( as per founder's townhall chat yesterday )

Oh wow. It only took them two months or what? I made my unofficial app based on reverse engineered API in 1.5 days. It was quite popular at the time.

Yeah I don’t understand their business model, there is a cost to process a payment so even if I give someone $100 the credit card company and payment processors will take a cut.

Now there is a difference between a platform that takes 15-30% cut and <5% but I really don’t see how they’ll be able to operate.

And this ofc goes beyond the fact as you mentioned that the big players can simply kill this by having a similar policy especially for smaller creators.

The only purpose of clubhouse that I can think off is if that’s exactly their plan in the first place.

The only other thing I can think off is if they’ll offer a content discovery platform and then charge creators to promote their content on the system but that’s arguably a worse off deal for creators since they’ll have to put in money upfront without any guarantee of returns.

They may not process the payment but just have a deal with cash app/stripe and have a free access to an api

If you read the linked announcement:

> 100% of the payment will go to the creator. The person sending the money will also be charged a small card processing fee, which will go directly to our payment processing partner, Stripe. Clubhouse will take nothing.

It's still a risky business model, since in certain fraud cases it will be left holding the bag for chargebacks if it has released the money to a fraudster but they don't have a revenue stream proportional to the payment amount to cover whatever percentage of the transactions are fraudulent.

Not sure why you're down voted. People that steal credit cards find ways to fund money from those cards to themselves. Fake apps are one way this can happen. When a company sets up a model where anyone could easily become a receiver of money and anyone could easily pay, they get into the AML world.

> When a company sets up a model where anyone could easily become a receiver of money and anyone could easily pay, they get into the AML world.

Yeah, it’s interesting how very few people know about the ways payment frauds take place.

An analogy I can think of is highways. A non trivial number of vehicles plying them are carrying illegal goods. Payments is similar, when you set up a path for money to flow between A and B the very first users to adopt that path are money launderers.

https://stripe.com/radar/chargeback-protection

Stripe Connect.

> Yet, with no Android app and an increasing amount of competitors copying the hell out of Clubhouse, I can only see this going in the way of Meerkat, Yik Yak and Periscope. (By being shut down)

We'll of course have to wait and see, but I don't imagine that Clubhouse will be entirely displaced. What's unique about Clubhouse is not the concept of a Clubhouse room itself, which is essentially a Discord channel with basic moderation capabilities, but the community it has created. For the moment at least, Clubhouse is chock full of cool and influential people.

Clubhouse rooms range from typical seminars, to loosely moderated discussions, to essentially chat rooms. The cool thing is you run into people who have interesting stories and lives. For instance, attending a seminar on nuclear disarmament with New York Times reporters, public policymakers, and whatever random influential people show up to pop up on stage. Or attending a discussion on Tibet where Ai Wei Wei, Tibetan monks, and other dissidents pop in.

Another interesting product of Clubhouse is that it's opened a large forum for Chinese-language public discussion. Clubhouse is one of the very few online places I've seen people willing to speak frankly on sensitive political issues in Chinese, perhaps because Clubhouse rooms are (at least nominally) ephemeral, leaving no record. Even though Clubhouse is now blocked in China, a lot of this discussion is continuing, with voices on all sides of the political spectrum.

But isn't it invite only?

You can create an account even without an invite. If you give it access to your contacts, your friends will get a notification to invite you, if they have an invite to give. Once you get an invite, your account will be activated, and you can use Clubhouse.

This is how I got in, through a friend I hadn't talked to in a while.

That’s an interesting way to scrape people’s connections and phone numbers.

It's been done before. I consider it a passive dark pattern.

The (possible) irony is that ClubHouse uses Agora behind the scenes to power its real-time audio. that’s a Chinese company based in Mainland China. I’d be careful if I was them. The double irony is that I believe Agora is blocked behind TGF.

Excellent point. There are apparently already Clubhouse bots as well, and it would be trivial to record audio using one (although you'd need a bot per room you want to record). It's probably very difficult to recognize Clubhouse bots as well, since you probably don't need that many of them, at least with Clubhouse's current scale, to record all the interesting big political discussions.

I think the usual abbreviation is GFW not TGF

And yet you still knew what they were referring to :)

This is something that is swappable if they're concerned about it. The brand, however, is not.

Will they be responsible enough to care about it before it becomes a problem? Proactive infrastructure upgrades are not a strong suit of most "hip" startups.

> Clubhouse is one of the very few online places I've seen people willing to speak frankly on sensitive political issues in Chinese

This is more an effect of you being exposed to Chinese people rather than some new phenomenon. Mainland politics is everywhere online, it's in the digital spaces that Westerners rarely visit though.

Would love to hear examples of other platforms.

What are some of these platforms? Would love to know

I get the feeling whatever I provide is going to be criticised, regardless, here goes:

百度贴吧 - https://tieba.baidu.com/

Probably the biggest platform out there. You can argue it's censored but then again the same arguments could be made about plenty of Western platforms who follow the moral mores of 2021. There's a lot of leetspeak to get around filters when talking about sensitive topics, translations aren't always great but if you find something particularly out of place maybe try checking for alt meanings.

There's >300 million active monthly users. Plenty of things you won't like in there.

人人 - https://www.renren.com/

Facebook style, mostly younger people.

天涯 - http://www.tianya.cn/

Traditional type forum, mainly older people, certainly more patriotic.

If you want to only read opinions you are more amenable to and won't accuse of being bots/cybertroopers I'd suggest the forums that foreign mainlanders often use. Around East Asia and the bamboo network there's few popular places:

吹水台 - https://lihkg.com/

Cari, an example thread - https://cn.cari.com.my/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=4263651&...

Plenty I've missed surely.

What's the best way to keep up with modern Chinese culture for someone in the Anglosphere? Is Avocado Toast a big thing among millennials in China? Is there (was there) any Hipster movement in China? To what extent does Western culture penetrate China and what are the latest fads or fashions?

Maybe you could watch their TV and movies? I've lived outside my country of birth for most of my life, so that's how I learned about American culture before moving there.

Of course after arriving, I realized that a lot of what I saw is either aspirational or realistic only for a very small cross-section of American people.

My prediction (based on little evidence, just gut feeling) is Clubhouse will go the way of Quora.

It started out with a bang (fanfare and huge celebrity usage), ended (well I guess Quora still exists...) with a whimper.

As a former Quora Top Writer (2013 and 2014), that makes a lot of sense to me. And faster, I'd bet.

What made Quora special in the early days was the high-quality community. Smart questions, smart writers answering them, even a reasonable proportion of smart comments. That seems to be the same sort of magic that Clubhouse has managed. It's not the technology, it's the community.

But as Quora tried to scale, that got worse and worse. It wasn't a small set of staff doing moderation, but a wider group of volunteers. The average quality of the questions declined. Comments became more tiresome. A lot of people started writing answers not for the joy of it, but because Quora's larger platform provided them with a means to some personal end. Comments became more tiresome. Indeed, now one of the first search results I get for "Quora" now is an article titled "How to use Quora to power up your lead generation." Ugh.

I'll be really surprised if Clubhouse manages to avoid a similar fate. There's a very low barrier to entry.

My instinct says you’re exactly on track.

Unfortunately.

Clubhouse is great right now and it seems to take far too long between “lightning strikes” of awesome communities.

But "lead generation" is the fate of all social networks. It may be cool at the beginning, but very soon marketers will figure out how to use it for commercial purposes, and this will become 90% of the use. It is the same story on Facebook, Pinterest, and so many others.

Yup. User-generated content is prized by social networks because it's free to acquire. But over time, you get what you pay for.

I don't have/don't want a Clubhouse account (it seems like a very cringe-inducing platform for people past their prime), but I actually think you're wrong.

Quora lends itself toward SEO spam. It's written word. Clubhouse currently isn't archived in a machine-readable format. This eliminates a decent 60% of the value for commercial purposes, and probably 30% will be taken care of by users having the common sense to avoid any overwhelmingly-obvious marketing.

Of course, it already is seemingly just a platform for aging capitalists and twitter users to "have discussions," which seems like shorthand for "advertise themselves." I couldn't call it good by any means. But that's more or less what every social media platform is, and not different than what you'd find anywhere else.

However, it seems unlikely it'll get much worse from here.

Any platform that 'recommends' content on the basis of user behaviour is going to incentivize spam. Clubhouse is new so maybe that's not there yet. The spammers will only open the floodgates once the audience is big enough.

I'm not saying that SEO spam will be clubhouse's problem. But there are more kinds of marketing than SEO. The "investment seminar" scam, for example, has been running for decades in the real world.

I also think it's a mistake to think that common sense will save us. Everybody has weaknesses, and any given scam is carefully optimized for its target audience.

But that's already happening on it! It therefore wouldn't be dropping in quality from where it already is!

Your theory is that there's no way for the proportion of low-quality content to increase?

Correct, because it's all pretty much low-quality content by most standards.

This is my feeling as well; Quora had the same feel when it was launched and now it's basically worthless with people only posting to promote their product/business.

I've found Quora pretty active, but I just use it to offhandedly ask dumb questions like "if Easter is so good why isn't there a Wester" whenever I think of them.

Half the time the answers are actually very educational and the other half it's a Facebook-style reply where an old person yells at me because they misread the question.

The one exploitative thing I've noticed is there's a "partner program" that pays you to ask questions, but it seems impossible to make more than 10c off it in a lifetime.

There are cool and influential people on Clubhouse, for sure. I listened to and participated in very interesting conversations. The vast majority of Clubhouse though is shady NFT talks, literally blind dating, and shameless self promotion by countless “coaches”, “facilitators”, and “DJs”. I do not have a good feeling about it.

“Majority” is a tricky term here since the hallways are so subjective and the recommendation engines are in flux.

I personally see maybe 1 blind dating room a week and only a couple NFT rooms in a 24 hour span.

> Clubhouse is one of the very few online places I've seen people willing to speak frankly on sensitive political issues in Chinese, perhaps because Clubhouse rooms are (at least nominally) ephemeral, leaving no record.

I don't think that's a reasonable assumption since the invention of screen recorders, especially combined with Clubhouse's "real name" and a "real face" policy (I'm not sure if the latter is official policy or just a community convention, I'd be more worried about the former)

I’ve found the total opposite. Most things I’ve listened to have eventually turned into a sales pitch. It’s almost like clubhouse is infomercials with listeners calling in.

And then there’s the avalanche of notification spam..,

Speaking of community and having 'influencers' on it, I would bet it takes more the route of Quora which once upon a time you could say similar things. But it's a complete shit hole now.

I don't even recall a time when Quora wasn't basically Yahoo Answers.

> For the moment at least, Clubhouse is chock full of cool and influential people.

There's a fundamental tension here. Cool and influential people want to hang out with other cool and influential people. Non-cool and non-influential people also want to hang out with cool and influential people. When you use your exclusivity to build popularity there's only one way it can play out. You can do it as slowly as possible or all in one big bang but it will happen.

> 100% of the payment will go to the creator

Ohhh, this is going to be a disaster for Manufactured Spend.

What?

He's suggesting two people can pay each other and get a ton of credit card points off it. This happens anytime you can refill something with 100% of the value you charged to a CC. I've noticed this with Ko-fi too.

It sounds like you also need to pay the Stripe processing fee, so I don't think that's viable in this case?

People forget that Instagram was iOS-only for quite a while before an Android version was available.

I’ve been on Clubhouse for over two months now; it’s very polished for a beta app and the community it has attracted is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced and I’ve been online since the BBS days of the 80s and everything since then.

The $100 million they raised from a16z gives them the runway to do things right. I see the copies shutting down before in their attempts to displace Clubhouse.

Instagram was a much more niche app back when it was iOS-only, and it didn't have the likes of FB, Twitter and Microsoft racing to copy all of its features.

There’s over 1 billion iOS devices out there; not having an Android version isn't a limiting factor.

I’m aware of lots of Android users who have bought used iPhones or are using their kid’s iPod Touch to access Clubhouse.

It's certainly a limiting factor to its supposed principles which claim it to be "inclusive" and "diverse".

https://www.notion.so/Community-Guidelines-461a6860abda41649...

I doubt it.

I've spoken with people from all over the world, including those in developing countries, in Clubhouse rooms.

You've spoken to iPhone owners only, of course they don't see a problem :)

Let me put it this way: there’s no lack of diversity or inclusiveness now on Clubhouse.

The days of only wealthy westerners having iPhones has long past.

What a strange app. Are people really that amazed by conference calls? It seems the entire play right now is exclusivity, not product.

Discord took the concept of "voice-only" communication software and extended it to a full integrated solution.

This is just, yet another "voice-only" communication app, except it's iOS exclusive, invite only and seems to focus on features that definitely have no place in a "developing" platform.

It's not a conference call. It's a moderated panel, and they have many famous / interesting people participating on their platform.

Aren't conference calls also moderated? Otherwise they would just be a broadcast.

That’s the gist of it. A moderated conference call with famous people on it. So it is like a podcast/conference call.

I tried it, but got bored of it :(. I think it’s because of the live nature of it and the fact there could be so many guests on at once.

I think clubhouse style audio and live stream selling (like qvc but on Instagram or Tik Tok) are the current and future trends.

No. A conference call allows anyone to talk whenever they want.

Conference calls also have hosts who can mute and manage the guests. We had conferencing 2.0 about 5 years ago with the likes of Uberconference, and now 3.0 with Zoom. What is actually new?

It’s a panel discussion, with an optional mic that can be explicitly passed around. There are bios on everyone that you can click around, no video, many rooms you can join arranged by subject matter and people, and a social network that includes many A-listers. The entire premise is different than a conference call. I don’t know what else to say… I’m guessing you haven’t tried it if you keep saying it’s the same thing.

So it's an un-edited Podcast you can only listen to live?

Or I guess if you're closer to my age, it's like a radio station you can't listen to without a password?

> without a password

Without a super secret invite!

Have you ever been to a panel discussion? It’s like that.

Indeed. Except, the value add is that anyone can run their own password-protected radio show, and the hope is "anyone" includes a lot of popular people.

It's audio snapchat, which everyone wants to join because all the cool people are also on it.

Not sure why this is getting downvoted. The main success factor for Clubhouse is the social graph. It is entirely possible to have access to people like Paris Hilton, Anthony Scaramucci, or MC Hammer among other notable people.

It’s strange to me that both you and I are getting downvoted… probably from people who haven’t actually used it? If you do, then it’s obvious how it’s not a conference call at all. It’s a panel that you might be able to participate in, which isn’t the same thing at all. Anyone can talk whenever they want on a conference call. The moderator chooses who talks in clubhouse.

There is conference call software that only allows a panel to talk. It's used to give remote presentations to a large group of people.

For example Webex has a product for that, as well as Bluejeans.

Conference calls have had guest management and moderation features for decades. Also several dozen social platforms already support livestreams with more functionality like video, files, chat, etc.

It’s a social graph that’s divided by time zone.

I can’t be connected to these people because I live in Europe and so times when I can reasonably be on a phone call do not overlap with theirs.

Twitter on the other hand... I can be connected with these people and not only can I “catch up” later, but reading Twitter in bed is more socially acceptable than being on a conference call.

It really is strange, I can only credit its success so far to the fact that it's tapping into people's primal urge to be able to literally shout down the opposition instead of just metaphorically shout them down. I don't know why anyone would find the format of being forced to debate on the spot better than having the time to construct posts at your leisure. Every clip or story I've heard/seen come out of the app has been a completely mess.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freestyle_rap

It's very early success (first 6 months) was because of VC hype [1]. You couldn't go anywhere online without hearing how Clubhouse is the next big SV social media bet. I'm guessing a lot of that hype has died down as users find out the app really isn't that useful.

1. You do know CH is valued at $1bn? I mean, the absolute insanity of this can't be understated. Their success is entirely manufactured https://pitchbook.com/newsletter/clubhouse-picks-up-new-fund...

That's because VCs got to use it, and nobody has a larger ego or desire for other people to hear them talk than a VC who's just been paid a lot to spend other people's money.

I've been using it as a language learning app. I just join some channels in my target language and listen to various people's voices and accents and try to understand them. Every once in a while if I'm feeling brave I'll raise my hand and utter a couple of sentences. The topics are simple and often very repetitive, which makes it well suited for practicing languages.

The "regular" channels didn't feel very valuable to me after a week of use or so, and a lot of them seemed exclusively made for the purpose of gaining more followers (either on CH, IG or Twitter, etc.).

It's more like a live podcasting platform. I joined and gave it an honest shot, but I just don't have time to sit and listen to people ramble. The 1-2 hours per day I do have need to be spent listening to something purposeful and produced, like an actual podcast or audiobook.

I also think CH is very limited in the content it provides. At least that's my estimation after using the app for a few months. Either the algorithm is failing at showing me content I care about, or the platform is failing at attracting content I care about. Either way, the people I follow don't produce content, and I don't produce content, so the content I receive is mostly horrendous garbage.

Having said that, I could see content selection improving once CH finally gives up the invite gimmick. Something like a moderated panel of experts talking live with audience participation _sounds_ interesting, but the experts have to be experts and they have to interesting. How people can listen to celebrities or random nobodies ramble for hours on end about nothing is beyond me, but that's like 99% of the content I see currently on CH.

I think the “live podcasting” is a post-hoc rationalisation. In my experience it’s much closer to a conference call than a podcast.

Specifically, lack of script, lack of direction, low audio quality, “am I muted?”, and people talking over each other.

Twitter in the early days was known for celebrities turning up and replying to or even following non-celebrities. Then Quora was known for this. Both outgrew this quickly - celebrities may still do these things, but proportionally less so and it’s not the draw to the platform.

I think Clubhouse needs to figure out what it’s draw is after this phase because right now it’s just a conference call with a celebrity.

Clubhouse's advantage over Twitter is that it's not recorded and you can't get reply guys. I know minor bluechecks on Twitter who are pretty annoyed by the platform because someone always yells at them or quotes them a month later no matter what they say. It's nice to have things disappear.

…It's really not fun to listen to, though, it is just a WebEx meeting with even worse audio.

Yeah that's a good point about reply-guys.

As much as I think that sort of moderation is great to have, I wonder how much it will limit their growth (which might be ok).

It's also a balance because if there is no interaction, if it's really not a chat room and is just a live show then I'd much rather just listen to a podcast on my time, at my convenience, with better audio quality and "is my mic on" edited out.

Exactly, celebrities plus wanna be celebrities plus startups.

Mumble + new rich = this

Brought to you by the authors of “this Dropbox thing is basically rsync and a bunch of shell scripts”

What complexity is being simplified here?

I see this misconception a lot when new startups start to gain momentum, the idea that it only makes sense for completely novel concepts to take off.

Clubhouse fills a specific niche that doesn't have a strong incumbent yet. It's essentially live podcasts/fireside chats where listeners can chime in.

As of right now, there are big players in podcast platforms and conference calls for work, but none whose platform is specifically built around the live podcast with interactivity from listeners option.

Successful companies aren't built around making something totally novel that's never been done before, this isn't the Nobel Prize. They're built out of creating the best and stickiest product/service for a use case that doesn't have one yet.

This provides a very strong incentive for bad actors on Clubhouse to create rooms to ask for money under false/scammy pretenses, and Clubhouse has an unclear moderation policy for that.

True, although it is not exclusive to Clubhouse. These actors are everywhere on the internet: newsletters, videos, tweets ... This just gives them an easy option to take money directly, instead of first funneling those funds through other products.

On another hand, it provides a strong incentive for Clubhouse to ban such bad actors asap without even a second thought, because Cluhbhouse doesn't make a single dime off them due to not taking a cut from payments.

No conflict of interest and no perverse incentives. Which is in stark contrast to some perverse incentives other popular platforms have, e.g., Twitter and FB being lenient on botting and fake profiles because it drives their usage metrics up (which is the main bread and butter of those two social networks).

You can't really ban "them," because you cannot objectively and factually verify they are bad actors. Check out how many startup pitch groups there are on Clubhouse. Some of those folks are actual investors, and some are just social media publicity stunt gurus. But both can sound equally good. Snake oil salesmen are going make a killing on Clubhouse.

Every content platform has a slew of top earners who are effectively bad actors. But they're profitable so they get to stay.

Diet supplements, vitamins, and other garbage on Youtube.

xQc on Twitch.

Every. Single. One.

How is xQc a bad actor? He just memes with his chat.

Are you trolling? He's been banned over a dozen times from twitch, OWL, GTA5 RP, for a reason. His chat spills over to other streamers, harasses them on Twitter and Instagram, and spreads misogynistic (whore, slut, etc.), and homophobic, filth.

The last incident? Yesterday [1].

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/LivestreamFail/search/?q=xqc&sort=t...

xQc is just an edgy entertainer with a short fuse. I wouldn't class him as a bad actor because I don't think he intentionally tries to ruin things.

Twitch chat is also a completely different beast that no one controls.

Not only is he not managing his fanbase, he is actively encouraging stream hopping. Moreover when he was banned from nopixel yesterday, server got ddosed into the ground afterwards ruining other people's streams.

Well that's kind of the big difference - such a bad actor is profitable for Youtube or Twitch (since they earn from the "safe" money stream of ads and engagement and are not in the risky money stream of payments for the shady goods/services), but loss-making if you're a payment intermediary without any direct revenue from their fraudulent schemes like Clubhouse intends to be.

You mean bad.

Moderation nothing, the chargeback rate on these transactions is going to be so high the whole service can’t last long.

Very interesting that they chose to go with a tipping model vs letting creators set up "pay to enter" chat rooms. That would be a lot more useful for the way I normally see the product used.

I guess this was just the easiest lift from the technical side (not too much work beyond copy pasting some Stripe sample code).

Although if it's just a matter of P2P money transfer for tips/donations then I'd rather use something like Venmo or Cash App and pay no fees. If I was a creator on Clubhouse I'd be putting "Venmo me at @XYZ instead of this" on my profile right now.

>Very interesting that they chose to go with a tipping model vs letting creators set up "pay to enter" chat rooms.

I believe the only way around Apple requesting a cut of the payment is to explicitly avoid any notion of "unlocking" extras or access within the app. The tipping method is just a way for users to send money to each other, no biggie... but "unlocking a room" is basically an IAP, or could be defined as one.

Patreon doesn’t give a cut to Apple. It isn’t that far from what is described.

Exactly. Apple is arbitrary when applying their own terms. Like Darth Vader.

Yeah. Your sibling comment drew a distinction, but it seems that distinction has arbitrary holes in its consistency as well. I’m sure if Patreon 50x’ed revenue and traffic starting next month — Apple would begin treating them more harshly.

It’s because it’s for a good or service outside the app and not a digital good.

Is this actually applied properly and consistently? How is a Patreon of videos or audio different than Spotify or Netflix? Didn’t they both have to remove being able to subscribe via their iOS apps unless they wanted to lose a 30% cut? This makes it completely arbitrary then. As I can subscribe to a new Patreon in the app still.

Yeah, good point. Here are the explicit guidelines: 3.1.3(d) Person-to-Person Services: If your app enables the purchase of realtime person-to-person services between two individuals (for example tutoring students, medical consultations, real estate tours, or fitness training), you may use purchase methods other than in-app purchase to collect those payments. One-to-few and one-to-many realtime services must use in-app purchase.

Plenty of people have CashApp links in their profiles; I’ve been tipped several times before they added payments.

Popular clubs have corresponding Telegram chats where people can tip Clubhouse users including using Satoshies via lightning network.

What is the official hackernews club on Clubhouse? I'd like to discuss things with a hackernews crowd in real time.

What is the actual monetization strategy other than sending money? Seems a bit weird for anyone to just send money to a creator. Is this meant to be some kind of tip jar?

This is a good point. I would rather have a ticket to enter a room. Or maybe a subscription which could be like a season ticket. The benefit of this would be that it would encourage curation of higher quality content. I would actively look for a room that was worth paying for.

I don’t understand why they are not keeping a larger percentage for themselves.

1/ This concerns me because I worry that clubhouse will not be sustainable.

2/ What is the incentive for them long-term to maintain this payment framework as well as to curate their network?

I think because then they have to give 30% to Apple

Yep: https://twitter.com/morqon/status/1379271413807390722?s=21

It may in part be because if they kept a percentage Apple would require these payments go through their in-app purchase system, subjecting ClubHouse to the 30% app store fee.

This trend of bundling easy payment into more platforms looks like good news for Stripe.

I think it's likely Stripe has caused the trend of bundling easy payment into platforms.

International maybe. Otherwise not really.

The definitely encourage it: https://stripe.com/connect

Wow that was FAST. I love this. Every other social platform has danced around this, seemingly, bc ads. Brilliant growth move here.

Why they don't charge any fees? I don't use clubhouse (Android) but if I were user I would be happily paying 1-2% fees and would rather prefer seeing service has source of income.

Because they need to hook the line first

Founder yesterday said "when you get paid..we get paid". So this is a beta test. Fees will come.

Because VC. You need growth, at all cost (both monetary and ethical) to get more VC money, and when you’re big enough you exit by selling to a big tech. That’s current Silicon Valley playbook.

I have a feeling that if they took a cut, they would also have to pay the 30% Apple tax. I bet they'll find a way around this though

For an early-stage venture-backed startup a small amount of revenue is worse than zero revenue. What the CEO has sold to investors is slices of glorious future potential. But once you have cold, hard cash coming in, suddenly people start evaluating you as a present, actual thing. And in practice, the amount of money coming in from a new, experimental product won't do shit to drop your burn rate. Better to stay in the land of glorious potential until you're sure your revenue graph is going to be the beloved hockey stick.

Ah yes, the classic Radio on Internet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo

Wow, that's so good. I've still never seen the show, as I am pretty sure I would die. But I really appreciate the clips I have so far survived seeing.

As a non-clubhouse user, is this just for supporting creators, or is there something a user might expect in return for sending money?

If I just wanted to support someone, I would think a venmo or cashapp handle is preferable since those are already hooked into my bank account and won't incur fees. I'm guessing this is just a first and necessary step towards adding payments elsewhere in the clubhouse platform though.

I’m surprised. With the explosive uptake they needed to keep on differentiating on features. Room searches, tools for moderation, tools for instant feedback, tools for scammer detection, tools for voting, tools for communicating media, and much more. They chose to add a feature that’s absent from competitors but, I’m guessing, nobody had asked for. My gut feeling is that it won’t last.

I really wonder how this is going to work with the Apple App Store rules on payments. Is the 0% cut so that they can use Stripe? Or is it to bolster their case that they don’t need or want to use Apple Pay? Normally Apple doesn’t like a service offering payments outside of the Apple Pay ecosystem. This seems like a very interesting move.

P2P payments don't have to use the App Store payment processor, see: Venmo, cash.app, etc.

Is it still P2P when (in the future) Clubhouse decides to start taking its own cut?

Here comes the adult audio content creators who will push the boundary on what's acceptable. The audio OnlyFans.

Audio OnlyFans already exist

What is it?

1-900 numbers moved online several years ago, there are gobs of phone sex websites that can readily be found with a Google query.

> Clubhouse will take nothing.

Interesting choice. It would have been easy to add an extra 1-5% on top of each payment.

The natural question then would be, what are they taking? They have to make money to survive somehow.

They're taking VC.

The strat here is probably to get as many users onboarded as possible ("of course I'll support them directly on Clubhouse, it's the cheapest way to do it!") and then at some point once people have grown accustomed to supporting creators through clubhouse they'll start taking a cut.

You would think they need to grow user count as quickly as possible (like all other VC funded startups), but the fact that they don't have a web app, don't have an Android app and don't have open signups on iOS leaves me very confused about their entire strategy.

Is Clubhouse just being pushed by VCs and other tech celebrities as their personal soapbox, or does it have potential to be something beyond that?

From my perspective it started getting pushed as soon as they raised from Andreesen at a $100M valuation.

It seems like a massive moonshot fueled by hype and VC money. No clue what the big vision is though.

> $100M valuation

For others reading, they recently raised from a16z at a $1 _billion_ dollar valuation. [1]

That comes less than a year after they raised $10m at a $100m valuation from a16z. [2]

1. https://pitchbook.com/newsletter/clubhouse-picks-up-new-fund...

2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2020/05/15/andreesse...

The "closed beta" is the marketing strat – people getting FOMO because they can't listen to a convo on CH.

"Anyone have a CH invite?" was something I was seeing a lot of on Twitter over the past yearish. FOMO is one helluva drug.

Sure, if done well that works great to generate buzz up to a certain point. Right now though I doubt there's anyone left who really wants a Clubhouse invite but can't get one (so the "exclusivity" thing isn't really driving anyone anymore), and the casual passers-by aren't going to bother jumping through hoops and will just move on.

>"exclusivity" thing isn't really driving anyone anymore

unless you don't have an iPhone. you can FOMO until the cows come home if you're an android person.

Has that thing worked once after Gmail rollout?

Facebook

Facebook happened roughly on the same time as Gmail.

Cynical me says they are building up an audience, and then they'll start injecting ads into the streams.

Users.

Welcome to VC funded businesses. They literally don't have to worry about creating money for now

That must be one helluva slide deck to convince VCs that user supported/subscription based income will work.

Not any different from every other VC funded company out there

This is what will come as soon as they're out of beta, obviously

I wish they would just charge a subscription fee for access to the back catalog and distribute a chunk of it to people based on an algo that encourages discussion and interaction. I have no desire to find 'content' on CH. I have had some awesome conversations with people on a wide range of fairly niche topics that never would have happened 'in the real world' without something like CH attracting a large following.

Is it just me or does Clubhouse totally abuse notifications? I turned it on and it spammed me non-stop for rooms that were nowhere near my interests. I had to deactivate, which made the app pretty pointless because I'm not aware of interesting rooms until afterwards. I wish you could tell apps "give me no more than 5 notifications a day, but those better be damn good notifications".

Also the front page of Clubhouse is just utter nonsense. So much influencer/entrepreneur-bro/bullshit. What I like about something like reddit is that while the default front page is quite trashy, you can curate it with subreddits to get a better experience. Clubhouse, probably due to lack of content, just gives you a mound of trash and expects you to pick out the good bits.

> spammed me non-stop

growth hacking. worked like a charm for FB, LinkedIn, etc.

They are aggressive. For each person you follow, you get notifications "Sometimes" when they are on stage. In practice, it seems like "Almost Always".

Yes - I had to disable them, but then of course I don't know when people I like and follow (comedians, politicians, etc) are engaging in interesting discourse.

I ended up turning them back on but I still get a lot of them even though I've changed the setting they provide to "less frequent".

I assume that Clubhouse is almost over before it began, like Meerkat before it.

Will Apple allow this?

Anybody manage to find a creator that has tipping enabled yet? Spent a bit looking and couldn't find anyone.

First ensure that you have the latest update of Clubhouse installed. Then look at for example this profile (update: link removed, see below.)

Edit: it seems that clicking the link to the profile I shared does not show send money button. Looks like you have to go via a room or club maybe?

Here, try going to this club instead and then visiting some of the profiles there and see if you see the button (again, after you’ve updated): https://www.joinclubhouse.com/club/atsm

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with this club. I post this simply because I saw that they had a room about Clubhouse payments, and people there have the send money button.

Is Clubhouse still being used? In my circle the hype pretty much died out around 2 weeks ago.

so far clubhouse has been great for weeding out contacts who use clubhouse.

Why?

Hmm, I see that they use Stripe. Can someone explain how does this not count as In-App-Purchases?

I would expect Apple to be all over this and apply it's Mafia cut?

Apple guidelines, section 3.1.1, regarding in-app purchases:

>Apps may use in-app purchase currencies to enable customers to “tip” the developer or digital content providers in the app.

Section 3.1.2(d), regarding permissible use of other payment methods:

>3.1.3(d) Person-to-Person Services: If your app enables the purchase of realtime person-to-person services between two individuals (for example tutoring students, medical consultations, real estate tours, or fitness training), you may use purchase methods other than in-app purchase to collect those payments. One-to-few and one-to-many realtime services must use in-app purchase.

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

It's fuzzy, perhaps, given the word "may". Apple's unofficial advice for fuzzy guideline questions is to implement, submit, and argue your case once it's live.

It's not fuzzy - 3.1.3 says that may not use "purchase methods other than in-app purchase" (since it's not one-to-one person-to-person service but tipping for one-to-many content) and must use in-app purchase.

This makes me want to try this app.

Grifters paradise.

Does anyone use clubhouse for anything other than self promotion?

in the past 4 weeks I've used it for the following, with impressive results:

- Networking - Learning about micro-cultures - Practicing my Russian daily - Motivation & Wellness tips - SaaS Growth Hacking tips - Parenting / Relationship Advice - Improve Jam Sessions using "looping" - Listening to a whole lot of authentic wisdom - Remote Sader during Passover - Having a Q&A w/ God.

The last time I've had such a plethora of quality engagement was at BurningMan ( circa early 2000's )

I'm amazed you've gotten so much out of the content there. In my testing it was a lot of jabbering on and it was very difficult to find good, relevant rooms.

i think that has to do with 3 factors: -- who i follow + their recommendations -- time spent discovering -- serendipity (very high)

I thought this was a sarcastic comment from someone else. It works equally well as a facetious comment.

The awkward conversation between Robinhood CEO getting grilled by Elon Musk was fun to hear. Though I didn't hear it on clubhouse app, I heard it on a YouTube video where they played the recording. I can kind of see the value of this.

It provides a platform to the opposition of many dictatorships

Clubhouse works really well for content creators. It enables serendipity it enables being able to interview people who are on the platform. It might not be the most optimal experience for contact consumers.

There are lots of people who answer noobie Bitcoin questions for free for hours and hours each day.

Does everyone just talk over everyone else on this thing? How does mass audio work?

This feels like a lazy feature ... why? Who does it serve? How does it make clubhouse better?

couldn't care less - still waiting for an invite 3 months later. probably won't join anyway now

I have invites, pitch why you'd make a good Clubhouse member.

the point is, they should have a quota set aside for people directly asking for invites - for people who don't want to beg their friends for them.

Yikes.

https://www.notion.so/Privacy-Policy-cd4b415950204a46819478b...

Full disclosure: I work in the payment space. -> I really wish that they used crypto for this type of things. Crypto has some pretty massive advantages. 1) No cc fees if you have a wallet. 2) No risk of censorship 3) support in any country.

Full disclosure: I’m being pedantic. Are you suggesting Clubhouse doesn’t use cryptography?

More seriously: cryptocurrencies don’t need to be shoved into everything, and I’d like if HN cryptocurrency warriors would stop assuming that it’s the ultimate and stable solution for all payment problems today.

touché ;) Not really a crypto warrior but I think it makes a lot of sense for mass payments. I used to lead one of the payment team at Uber ... turns out sending money to people all over the world is a pretty hard problem in the traditional finance space.

It’s also very hard to use, mistakes are permanent and a lot if not most people never hold any crypto outside of the exchanges.

Transfers are also slow and too expensive for small amounts.

Moving funds costs about 20$ at the moment for BTC.

Sending bitcoin over the lightning network is instant and cost fractions of pennies.

Sphinx Chat and Breez (a bitcoin wallet) already support streaming sats to podcasters in realtime: https://medium.com/breez-technology/podcasts-on-breez-stream...

Checking https://mempool.space, a low-priority transaction is about $5.99. That could be $50 worth of bitcoin or $500,000 worth of bitcoin to another bitcoin address anywhere in the world, with zero counterparty risk or middlemen.

Of course, using lightning, the payment is instant and cost fractions of a penny.

That's a lot of effort to increase your risk of not having a trusted middleman and pay more fees.

WIth regular systems you have a Bank, a payment processor and a sale processor which collectively provide the following experience:

1) transaction fees at the range of 0.1$ and up at %1-%3 that is incorporated in the price. 2) Visa/MasterCard etc, you don't have to choose your merchant depending on your coins you have, it works everywhere globally 3) Fraud protection is included, if something doesn't work out as expected or you simply made a mistake you get your money back easily 4) payment takes about 1 to 5 seconds and usually is hassle free, like tap a botton to start the payment tap once more to confirm the payment. 5) funds security is guaranteed through reversibility and active security, no risk of going broke when trying to listen to a conversation online.

Crytpo <> Bitcoin. You can get pretty cheap transactions on other network. Research Layer 2 Ethereum or blockchain like stellar are great for micro payments

Other networks are irrelevant if my funds are not in that network or the merchant is not on that network. Moving funds between networks tend to be expensive and inconvenient as you need to go through an exchange.

> To send a payment in Clubhouse, just tap on the profile of a creator (who has the feature enabled) and tap "Send Money".

> Enter the amount you would like to send them. The first time you do this, you’ll be asked to register a credit or debit card.

That's unusually generous. Apple and Google take note.

Pushing the processing cost to the user doesn't imply it's zero-cost for Clubhouse; they're still on the hook for disputes/refunds.

Are they? Presumably if there is a dispute they will just remove the money from the creator.

Yes, But they would incur an additional service charge for that dispute. That’s the worst part about being a merchant. Someone buys a digital product from you, then they file a chargeback. You are then down the original charge plus a fee that can be as much as $25 or more.

If they pay out money to creators in a reasonable time, then a fraudulent "creator" (accounts created with fake/stolen identities and tipped with stolen cards) will withdraw anything ASAP and there won't be anything to remove/recover; and if they want to protect from that, then they have to do invasive verification and/or freeze any income for a quite long time.

They can just do KYC for people who withdraw money from the platform.

I don't see how Clubhouse taking nothing is sustainable. I'm suspicious their "take nothing" approach lasts forever.

It's temporary to encourage demand for the feature.

At some point in the future they will have to take some percentage.

Apple Pay Cash (the one in the Messages app), Google Pay take $0.00 for person-to-person payments. Given Clubhouse isn't formally introducing some sort of monthly payment or "pay me for access to Clubhouse streams" thing, they can probably argue they're just creating another P2P money sending service.

I think it's naive to think that they're doing this out of pure goodwill. They've taken over $100 million in funding in only a year of being in business. Since they're so new, my estimate is that they're generating goodwill with consumers before any of their investors are expecting to make their money back. Given the sheer number of Clubhouse competitors, this is probably a smart move for their business. They get to generate reactions like yours en masse.

They're building a strong brand and reputation to beat out the competition, and they'll only start monetizing once they've won.

I wonder how this will compete with things like substack.

Will creator support like clubhouse's payments, undermine or enhance things like payments from platforms like substack.

I use both for my newsletter: For example my newsletter ProductiveGrowth , weekly stories about productivity, leadership, motivation, and anything else that helps us and our teams grow and be more productive.

I don't use either payment option now, but make me wonder which to use.

- https://productivegrowth.substack.com/ - https://www.joinclubhouse.com/club/productivity-business

Is this a shameless plug disguised as a comment?

Kind of looks like a Clubhouse bio, ironically

This seems like one to downvote

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