Clubhouse doesn’t value privacy, security or accessibility
cigionline.org
cigionline.org
Clubhouse's entire value proposition is artificial scarcity. It's the NFT of social networks. Take something that is abundant and cheap in the world of software (communication, space, room size) etc, and artificially bog it down to create a zero-sum game of status.
It's basically 'un-innovation' for a lack of a better term. Technically there's nothing in Clubhouse that if it doesn't already exist anywhere else cannot be copied in five minutes. All the things clubhouse places limits on already are abundant, which is why their market value is, ironically enough, 0.
Saying that it's just another product and that it can be copied in 5 minutes is missing the point. The choices that they've made, their decision to eschew everything except for voice, help create a medium that is intimate, thoughtful, and kind. And otherwise busy people are addicted to it.
Someone I know said that talking on ClubHouse felt like being back at Stanford. Just the electrifying conversations. The sense of possibility. There's something special here.
Recently, I decided that I'd like to interview a cosmonaut who has never been interviewed by the west before. To tell his story before a broader audience. And I started a ClubHouse room to do it, and people from around the world came together to help me. Including people who knew him! I'm just a stranger, but they heard me explain why I wanted to preserve this man's legacy and that was enough. People were happy to chip in and help.
That's magical. And I haven't experienced anything like that before. There's this profound sense of intimacy that this platform produces that's missing elsewhere.
I keep repeating myself, but there is something here. It's a mistake to discount it.
The average person doesn't want to spend hours listening to thought leaders who are in love with their own voice pontificating randomly on topics that don't affect or address their lives in any way. To believe that they will to such an extent that A16Z is willing to give them a $4B given zero revenue, declining traction, and no clear business shows that all you need to do to gain ever-increasing valuations in the tech world is to serve up the exact kind of frou-frou, nebulous bullshit that you wrote and that VCs eat up.
While I understand where you're coming from, this is the kind of conversation that has turned me off from most of the internet.
On the months I've been on ClubHouse, I've never had an exchange like this. But elsewhere on the web? It's fairly common.
Text is a hard medium to discuss complicated ideas in. It's too easy to be snarky. You get kudos for it. But that's harder to do in voice. Because you'd have to hear my reaction, and the reactions of others. You'd have to hear how off-putting it is.
I prefer ClubHouse now, because the rest of the web is so snarky. And do you blame me? Given how you've reacted to me?
The problem is not that you prefer clubhouse. Instead, it is that you have ascribed some magical property to it, and are treating it like it is some revolution.
That is great that you have found something that you prefer. But there is no need to talk in such grandious terms, when talking about a voice chat app.
Says someone who has never tried running a voice chat app at scale. It's not a flying car or a spaceship, but it's technically difficult.
I never said it wasn't technically difficult to do something like that at scale. Although, from what I have heard, they actually have outsourced most of the technical parts of the app, to some other company also.
The point though, is that you should not pretend like this is some revolutionary new thing, that is going to change all of society.
Thats all. Its a voice chat app. No need to ascribe anything magic to it.
> It's not a flying car or a spaceship
Ok great, so you agree with me that the person I was responding too was being kinda silly, by describing a voice chat app, in magic, grandiose terms.
They have changed society.
Something can be both simple and revolutionary.
I think most of us would agree that they've changed society for the worse. It pains me as a starry-eyed techie kid from the 90s that this is what we've done. Life was so much better before social media.
But yes, they've dramatically changed society.
I agree with this but I didn’t want to presume it, since there are positives too.
Just because it isn't important and profound to you personally doesn't mean it's stupid. Whatever you mean by that word anyway.
Anyway, this all stems from a fundamental misreading. I said that things can both be drastic, and stupid. I never said what, nor claimed that something significant and profound cannot also be stupid.
This is the statement I'm responding to. I think it demonstrates a lack of vision, and I'm trying to correct it. So yeah, basically different conversations at this point.
There's nothing fundamentally limiting SMS to being stuck to that. That SMS didn't add better 1:something capabilities is an indictment of post-1995 cellular carrier pricing models and greed.
They could have prevented and owned the entire messaging space, all of which is essentially an attempt to recreate basic messaging functionality that SMS lacks.
On the search side, there's nothing stopping a carrier from indexing public SMSs and making them discoverable. We're not talking about rocket science, in the basic realization [0].
I'm not sure why HN is looking at these things like (short blobs of text) are completely different than (short blobs of text). Everything built around them is plumbing. Complicated, difficult plumbing, but plumbing nonetheless.
I'm all ears as to why providing an SMS service that supports all of Twitter's features would have been technically impossible... say, circa-2000.
The way you are looking at things, the iphone isn't really an upgrade over the blackberry or palm pilot.
I think we're in agreement while disagreeing. My fascination isn't so much that the phone companies couldn't do it (because they could), but that they didn't (because they couldn't even imagine it).
Props to Twitter for envisioning the product, but "What if?" phone companies had {Twitter, Facebook} is an entirely plausible, albeit organizationally-unlikely present.
It would have required them to pivot their thinking from maximally taxing use of capital-intensive investments to growing scalable platforms, but stranger things have happened. And the internet's growth was already obvious in that time frame.
Social media is unfortunately one of the biggest changes in how people communicate this century so far but Twitter is only a small part of that.
The ways Facebook, Insta, etc are being used now are heavily influenced by what Twitter started doing first.
It's trivial to buy a bot farm and pump up your tweets to make it seem you have a large following or tons of people agree with your opinion when in fact it's all manufactured. But hey, all that tech is complicated right? Better to not think about it... /s
I'm not a Clubhouse user but I wouldn't at all be surprised if it had it based on how people talk about it.
For the first time I actually want to try Clubhouse.
That's very sad.
You'll get booted the second you try and the conversation will continue on. You'll then get banned from the room/community. And if you do it often enough, from the platform.
The person who invited you will also get banned if enough of their invitees do such things.
That's one of the benefits of making it invite only. There's an inherent social graph to who is inviting whom; it's like a giant house party. You don't want to be the person who brought the asshole who harshed the vibe. Even if you don't care, the house rules are simple - bring bad guests often enough, and you won't get invited to the party. It's that simple.
So yeah, use your shot to chill with interesting scientists, engineers, artists, and assorted people from across the world to troll them. It's yours to waste.
Personally, your description of how you use Clubhouse sounds sad to me. Different strokes for different folks, my man.
Yes, those conversations are dreadful. And there are a lot of them. But you’re doing just another version of “Reddit is a website filled with silly cat pictures” here.
Which is a highly desirable niche for many people.
This sounds like a self-correcting problem if true.
Rich people funding low probability but high expected value moonshots is the system working as intended.
On the opposite, by being predators of user privacy they are hostile.
I think this quote reveals a lot more than the person you know necessarily intended.
> Recently, I decided that I'd like to interview a cosmonaut who has never been interviewed by the west before.
I would have loved to listen to this conversation, but unfortunately, I come from a working-class background in the UK, and as such, I don't know anyone who would have a Clubhouse invite to give me. I'm not trying to make any assumptions about your background here, and I'm sure there are many people on Clubhouse who come from un-privileged backfrounds, but perhaps the intimacy of the environment comes from being surrounded by people who come from a similar place (i.e: Ivy League colleges, Silicon Valley companies) due to the exclusivity Clubhouse has imposed.
I'm happy to send you an invite. Message me on twitter.
The thing about Clubhouse is that it doesn’t matter who is listening, it only matters who is talking. Unless you're an A-tier person, nobody will care if you're not there.
In that way Clubhouse is the same as podcasts.
None of this makes Clubhouse bad. It just means it’s not that different from recorded interviews for example.
Intimacy as a sevice, the world's oldest profession... now backed by venture capital.
It's something that was never going to last, and as far as I can see it is already over. Yes I gave Clubhouse an honest try after it was all hyped up at my workplace, what I encountered was overwhelmingly 1) Get rich quick scammers talking about how to get success like "Rich Person XYZ" or 2) Celebrities (of varying degrees) talking to/with their fans (or rather: bathing in their narcissism).
Hardly what I would describe as magical. And from what I can see even this artificial hype is already starting to die.
It is something everyone who ever played the closed beta or alpha versions of an online game before knows, those are cool, friendly and brimming with interesting encounters too while it lasts. Do you honestly believe the feeling and special community you describe is something that is still around on there or will be still around in a month or two?
All that could be done on discord, but discord is far gaming, so it won't happen.
But clubhouse seems to be perceived has "the place to hear quality conversation from important people". I can see value in that if the team manage to live it up to it. Not as a user though, but I'm not the target.
The broad audience being a bunch of Westerners on an iOS-only, invite-only app?
I've been using Clubhouse for a year, and seen various iterations. Earlier, there was so much human connection. I talked to amazing people almost 1:1, and it was like being part of a small club. As it grew, it became more like a 24/7 conference where you could drop in to hear any topic you want. Less my thing, but still fascinating.
You could argue that things being realtime cause FOMO, but that's true about conversations. Everything is so "on-demand" now; there's something nice about the ephemeral, realtime nature of it. It encourages spontaneity.
The same thing could be said about other collectibles. There isn’t anything stopping people from printing their own baseball cards, but that doesn’t change the market.
Is the app some deeply innovative technology? No. But it is a thoroughly well-done combination of existing technology, and it has evolved social networking to be much more pleasant, thought-provoking and intimate than what has come before.
Status-seeking is the reserve currency of social networking applications (including this one we're using right now), but at least Clubhouse aligns the incentive to seek status with generating a quality product for the community. (Maybe it's just too soon to say for sure; I imagine there existed a time when people on Instagram really did get attention for interesting photos.)
Even before voice, we could do that on text chat (Wow and SC were quite political if you wanted to)
And of course IRC and forums.
But don't worry, as soon as the CCP realize Clubhouse is a place for talking about this, it will take actions.
My post explicitly said that Clubhouse's combination of existing technology is what makes it unique - voice chat, topic/person discovery, search. All of those things are possible through other mash-ups of existing technology. Hell, you could conceivably clone Clubhouse with a Minecraft server and Discord.
But CH has the overall experience that reduces friction. And now it also has network effects, since enough interesting people are on it that the experience is just that much better.
I, likewise, share the concern that the CCP will use its heavy hand to destroy CH. I hope the founders are smart enough to divest from CCP-controlled tech ASAP.
It’s also very strange to talk about SV and backers as if they’re some homogenous group. A diversity of skill sets, ethos, and methods exist. Many founders are going at it for the first time. And financial backers aren’t usually technically literate to warn about incrementing ids in SQL. They want to know how fast you’re growing and the business prospects.
If we start creating laws around these things, then it’ll only be even tougher for up-comers to challenge the existing big players. It would be great if the mobile platforms could proxy contacts to at least solve that privacy problem while also being reasonable in their usage, but all new companies have to find some way into people’s hearts and minds that easily will forget about a new app within 10m of existing their first usage.
This is such an unimaginative take. Laws could easily demand easy export of _all your_ data and interoperability of chat systems.
For a chat app, that would just mean using en existing solution like XMPP or Matrix and provide API documentation for any added deltas.
The less you touch user data, the less you have to think about this.
I suspect it's solvable if society has at least a slightly coherent idea of what's desired though.
Many businesses base their existence on breaking and building systems. After all, they're called start-ups for a reason. Proactive regulation (which seems like what you're proposing) just sounds like putting the cart before the horse and expecting the rest of the world to follow. To paraphrase Henry Ford, if he concerned himself with what people said they wanted, they would ask for faster horses.
The bifurcation-chaos that intuitively seems to surround network effects makes for an interesting fork here, actually (assuming of course that my intuition is anywhere close to correct). Both sustained overreaction and sustained underreaction can get very bad. Looking at the earlier example, earlier communication grids' network effects were more dependent on physicality, and “everything is ephemeralized as software with effectively unstoppable automatic updates” is a huge lever in both speed and dimensionality of power. So maybe the meta problem of “legislation can't operate as a control system with enough bandwidth to keep up with technology businesses wiggling the cable to get what they want in the grapple for the ‘humanity's nervous system’ role” is more important here.
Or, perhaps, human societies decide that technology level exceeding value reach is so undesirable that the innovation explosion becomes a casualty of preserving humanity's nature, because the alternative of it eating into everything faster than it can respond (which I would say is what is happening now) is worse, and then we get Dune. Or perhaps we designate sub-areas of society as experimental zones, regulate the heck out of the stable zones, and get closer to dath ilan…
> I just don’t see how the law can make apps interoperable without huge barriers of entry that would benefit the incumbents.
I don't see how making such a huge dent in network effects will be anything but a detriment to the incumbents.
The exact same way it works with open banking api's.
Article 30 of the GDPR states that companies with fewer than 250 employees do not need to keep processing records unless “the processing it carries out is likely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of data subjects, the processing is not occasional, or the processing includes special categories of data…or personal data relating to criminal convictions and offences.”
Your point about an authoritarian government siphoning user data from companies which siphoned that data is also possible and valid.
For interoperability etc I disagree. Leverage on existing protocols where possible and you get most of it for free. E.g. use xmpp/matrix if you need IM-like functionality.
That's very "entrepreneurial" view. From big networks we've learnt what issues are there, but we should exclude small players from the rules, because it makes it hard to create a product?
I do get a sentiment, but some products are just super hard to build and require huge capital and time investments. Does that give advantage to big established players? Yes. But why should we allow small players to act knowingly in a way that's bad?
> Rohan and Davison, who met at Stanford and have an estimated nine failed apps between them
This feels nasty.
More boring culture war stuff:
> Clubhouse is yet another example of technology designed by, and largely for, privileged, white, Western and able-bodied men
> In 2020, only 2.3 percent of all venture funding went to female founders (down from 2.8 percent in 2019, as women were hit harder by the pandemic)
Having used the app, I can say this one also seems particularly nasty because it's untrue. There is a lot of diversity on Clubhouse. And even a lot of wokeness. And even a lot of anti-wokeness. It all depends on where you look.
This is a bit shameless, but here's an excerpt from my exegesis - https://areoform.wordpress.com/2021/04/18/on-clubhouse/,
> Which brings me to the role of ClubHouse as a generator of profound experiences. Some nights ago, an ex-TLA (Three Letter Agency) officer walked into the room, sparking a conversation about strategic elicitation (brought up by me) and empathy for difficult people (brought up by him). Our conversation was interrupted by an admittedly troubled person angry about the “plandemic,” spoiling for a fight. In text, we would have ignored him – he had been banned from most social media platforms. Or, given in and argued with him, but it was clear that he was deeply upset. And so we talked.
> He was a struggling musician. Who had lost his living when the pandemic hit and the symphonies shut down. The world was a harsh place for him. He was also one of the few people in the world who had mastered a very particular instrument brought into prominence by Beethoven. And so we begged him to play. To share his gift with us. He obliged by playing a beautifully complex piece of music that demonstrated his mastery over the instrument. We thanked him. Said our goodbyes, and went to sleep.
> A charged situation was transmuted into the magical.
Yes, it's flawed, but I'm glad that it exists.
There's a unique energy in the air, when it comes to ClubHouse. There's something magical about it. I'm worried that it too will get lost to entropy and the casual cruelty of crowds. (it's harder to be cruel when people know each other)
These tools can be used or wielded either as weapons or for healing-learning. I think we're just beginning to organize to understand after the clusterfuck of the experience of Facebook and the current mainstream status quo "social media." Likewise decoupling someone's reach by providing video services - whether live or recorded - and not being dependant on mainstream media to determine who's messages get out, and how long they can be, along with rehumanizing it, faces and voice being more engaging than simply test, is what we needed; where an individual like Joe Rogan acts a curator to expose interesting guests to share their story for 2-4 hours - essentially creating/expanding nodes of leadership - whether entertaining, educational, or role modelling.
I think whatever experience people have on Clubhouse will fully depend on the context, the curators, and so ultimately how Clubhouse or such platforms are governed; along with how access to the information is managed, if all the most popular people start putting their content behind walled gardens then that's arguably a problem - or then we allow privacy if anyone is trying to extract too much, whatever is considered unreasonable.
You could have run all of the symposiums and Chautauquas you wanted through these preexisting platforms. But Clubhouse, like NFTs, openly flaunts its exclusivity. It advertises private conversations to the world to boost demand. Creating artificial scarcity to overvalue itself.
And your anecdote? I don't doubt it happened, even if it sounds dubious. How did a struggling musician even get onto this platform? And if he did, then what does it say about the exclusivity it promises? Plenty of services were invite only at the onset, from Gmail to Spotify. Will Clubhouse remain that way indefinitely? Or will eternal September come for you, too? At best, perhaps it will become another MasterClass, with hyped experts in their field hawking their wisdom in different rooms for pay (this, too, must monetize). This magic you describe, it is as fleeting as in any platform. The only way to preserve it is to embrace privacy and anonymity. Private Slack servers, private Discord servers. Telegram and Signal conversations. A platform that brags about exclusivity yet does not embrace anonymity is just begging for the masses to drop by.
Be it airbnb or reddit almost all companies have employed one shady tactic or another to grow and maybe once the site is pretty popular they maybe take some steps to fix these issues on surface and hopefully people will forget about such things soon (1)
(1) https://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-d...
I convince friends occasionally but the privacy argument does next to nothing. The gif search, reactions, and MMS handling are all better selling points.
> or provide any way for users to exercise their data protection rights
the privacy policy, in fact, does. Per it's update date of 5 April -- before the publication of this article on 28 April -- the privacy policy says
> Please log in to your account or contact us (at support@alphaexplorationco.com) if you need to change or correct your Personal Data, or if you wish to delete your account.
Not to mention the persistent use of single companies and their actions used to malign every startup. See, eg, the article about clearview. (If the author weren't lazy, they probably would have realized clearview is not actually a silicon valley company: it's in ny, and the primary investors are Kirenaga partners, an east coast vc firm. So really only tenuous connections to sillicon valley)
Who is doing that?
Governments have so far completely failed to manage intrusive tracking.
Apple isn’t acting like a government. They are simply recognizing that this is an attractive service and providing it.
> they also, for example, pull apps that poke at how iPhones are made in sweatshops... that they occasionally move to do something someone finds valuable doesn't exonerate them or forgive how much power they have accumulated.
This is just generic Apple hate and not relevant to the thread.
Note: this is much larger than the data leak mentioned in this and other recent articles.
If privacy, security, and accessibility advocates want to be taken seriously they need to stop bitching every chance they can and start offering solutions to developers to make it brain-dead simple to respect all 3 aspects while not slowing down the pace of development. Instead accessibility advocates seem to be more interested in criticizing every attempt at automating accessibility while acting incredulous when early stage startups aren't willing to pay them $300/hr to consult on UIs that may not even make it into production.
> A truly innovative product would learn from the mistakes of predecessor platforms and would focus on things like privacy, security and accessibility.
Privacy comes at a big cost to VC funded companies that have no business plan and focus on getting billions of users to profile and profit from.
Security is becoming a lost cause with each passing day. The amount of personal data leaked online dwarfs the amount of personal data not leaked online (citation needed, but this is what it appears like to lay people).
Accessibility is usually an afterthought that comes into focus after a billion (or two) users are captured to firm up valuations or when the threat of lawsuits arise in jurisdictions where that’s a possibility.
> This is our opportunity to demand more and to demand better. After all, if Clubhouse users do not demand these things from the outset, why should the policy makers whom we ask to regulate these technologies care?
Clubhouse users aren’t going to demand any of these just like Facebook users didn’t demand better from Facebook and its companies, and in the face of more abuse by the platform didn’t leave those. The revenue and profit numbers speak to the kind of addiction that these platforms manage to create and grow.
Those who care are more likely not to use Clubhouse in the first place. Yet, policy makers do need to be reminded of their duty to protect people even if said people don’t understand or don’t seem to care.
What's the argument for the government to care so much about privacy, if people don't? I get why we have banking protection laws. It would be extreme chaos if people's money could just disappear. But in what way is poor security and privacy practices more than a nuisance?
I think people like us weigh this problem too heavily, because 1) we want to use apps and technology like these, 2) we really care a lot about doing it securely.
But the public just doesn't care as much as us. Why should there be laws and policy just to suit our purposes?
> It is clear that Clubhouse was not designed with privacy in mind. The app, which initially launched without a privacy policy,
To support this claim, the author links to a Twitter thread [1] where someone first says there is no privacy policy, then someone else provides a link to it, then the first person shows a video that appears to show a broken Privacy link on the Clubhouse website -- a web site that nobody visits because Clubhouse is an app. As far as I know, the in-app link to the privacy policy and the link on the App Store have always worked -- this is one of the things that Apple consistently checks before approving an app.
So somehow, having a broken link becomes they "launched without a privacy policy". You might say, well, maybe the author didn't read the Twitter thread carefully. But who was the person on Twitter who pointed out that Clubhouse does, in fact, have a Privacy Policy? It was Elizabeth Renieris -- the same Elizabeth Renieris who wrote the article! In other words, she's completely aware that her claim is untrue, yet she makes it anyway.
> Instead, Clubhouse is yet another example of technology designed by, and largely for, privileged, white, Western and able-bodied men.
First, this ignores the fact only one of the two founders of Clubhouse is white -- the other is a brown immigrant from a non-Western country. I doubt the author is unaware of this, and is simply reclassifying asians as "white" because it supports her narrative.
Secondly, attempting to paint the founders as ablist because they don't yet support captioning is both heartbreaking and absurd. One founder has a daughter who was born with a genetic defect that causes severe disabilities, and he has put a tremendous amount of effort raising awareness and fundraising for this [2]. He's literally the last person you'd accuse of holding a prejudice against the disabled.
Finally, at least in my experience, Clubhouse seems to have created a community where minorities and women are welcomed and play a prominent role in leading and moderating discussions. The claim that Clubhouse is designed largely for white men seems... completely unsupported.
This isn't a good point. You can have a disabled daughter and still produce an app that excludes large groups of differently abled folks.
He's literally the last person you'd accuse of holding a prejudice against the disabled.
No, he's not, because that's a naive way of thinking about prejudice. Also, hilariously, you are saying he's even less likely to be prejudiced than people who themselves are disabled.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
These have been repeatedly demonstrated not to matter to large enough swaths of the population. That makes them irrelevant to growth unless you are targeting one of those particular niches.
I'm not saying that a company can never succeed by following all the rules--just that it's a lot less likely.
Have we learned nothing from 2008? The only thing that is going to deter white collar crimes is jail time--everything else is just the cost of doing business.
Small correction: a company that acquired capital at a $4bn valuation. As VCs are well known to shore up countless failures with few overwhelming successes, That valuation is essentially useless.
If you want a correct valuation, you'll have to wait and see what employees get for their shares.
Facebook (and others) grew because a lack of privacy and security was the goal. Images were public and tagged, conversations were viewable by anyone, the minifeed made it easy to see every change people made, etc. It was exclusive (college only) but also very public. The high amount of content and low amount of friction made it spread virally. Now it's much more locked down, but that's okay... it already hit a critical mass.
The current consensus about privacy and security seem to be at odds with what's necessary to make a social network work. The ability to connect with anyone at any time with no friction is what makes social networks thrive, but also what enables harassment and abuse.
I think it's likely we've already seen the last great social network.
Clubhouse is just another twist on a community-esque one. Will we ever see a social network at Facebook's scale? Probably not. Will we see more social networks at the Twitter/Discord level, I bet we will.
Facebook/Twitter-style social networks were great until the point they started being "curated" (aka optimized for revenue). Once that happened, they rapidly lost their utility as a tool to actually connect people, and decayed into a medium to deliver advertisements (whether they be banner-style ads, influencers or sponsored posts).
My somewhat controversial take is that the era of social media being used as a tool to connect people is over. "Social networking" (as it's still called) will predominantly be used to connect people to brands/influencers, but it won't be used to connect people that actually know each other.
Younger people fled from Facebook, as it became increasing curated and infested with news, ads, etc.
As Facebook declined, Instagram became the primary social network to keep up with friends. Instagram surpassed Facebook's popularity, until users fled Instagram for many of the same reasons they fled Facebook. But what's different this time is that there isn't some brand new social network emerging to take up Instagram's mantle as the primary social network to connect people. Instagram's relevance has faded, and it's been replaced by nothing.
For the reasons you discussed, I don't think we'll ever see another social network reach the prominence of Instagram. Yes, TikTok exists, but it's more of a YouTube competitor, and makes no attempt to connect people, as Facebook and Instagram once did. Also there is a general cynicism around social media, which will make it challenging for new social networks to emerge.
What comes after social networking? I'd say messaging will replace social networking as the primary means to connect people over the web. Privacy is less of a concern with messaging, as users directly control who their information is shared with. Messaging has fewer of the negative psychological effects we see with social networking (eg, brigading, obsessing over likes, etc...). And perhaps most importantly, messaging enables users to avoid the algorithmic "curation" (aka advert optimizations) we see on social networking.
Discord and WhatsApp are the two most prominent examples of messaging services that could effectively replace social networks as a medium to connect people. Clubhouse itself is also a messaging app (just auditory, rather than textual). iMessage could be another huge player in the space if Apple makes the right moves.
https://mosen.org/episode-99-all-you-need-to-know-about-club...
Of course, the fact that it excludes deaf people is still a concern.
I don't even understand this. What are you suggesting? That auto-captioning be mandatory for all voice applications? The technology is only barely there, and is crazy expensive to consume unless you've developed the tech in-house (ie, Google). What about Discord or just normal phones -- are those fine?
If you're just saying "have text-only channels" I don't understand the point of using Clubhouse in the first place. There are a ton of great text-only messaging platforms.
And that's why I'm staying away from Clubhouse as long as I can. I believe that we should prefer text for important discussions, so as not to leave people out. We're still learning how to effectively have online discussions in text, but I think it's too soon to give up on it and retreat to relying on audio.
The friction to hearing and expressing ideas is way lower via audio chat. It's just a different population than everyone here, content to read text and compose replies.
I also don't know why you brought in "important discussions" - while I had a great 3 hour conversation last night on how to resolve disputes without authorities, I joined a room just because I saw some friends there playing "never have I ever", I didn't go seeking out an important discussion but I had one anyway, that's what gets people talking about their positive experience - the spontaneity and unexpected outcomes of it.
I didn't say anything about how that text is written or read. Remember that I started this thread by talking about how blind people can use Clubhouse with their screen reader. So I encourage a variety of input and output methods -- keyboards of all kinds, speech recognition supplemented by whatever methods we can come up with to edit the dictated text, screens, text-to-speech output, etc.
Oh wait, it's a closed source application on top of a extremely closed down OS, never mind...
Prime example is how HN comments contain a wealth of information compared to the articles they link to. I gain absolutely nothing from hearing or watching someone speak, except for wasting my time. I’d rather read their transcript and the ensuing discussion for a quicker, more balanced view of the situation (assuming the people in the discussion are qualified to discuss).
it's... something how this article links to folks that just assume it's easy to do, and do well. Let alone in real time.
Microsoft didn't buy nuance for $20B because accurate speech-to-text is easy.
Yes, in Europe we got GDPR. In the USA you got a bunch of jokes and jokers trading your data for peanutes.
The disregards towards 'anything' is BAU.. "move fast, break things". I feel that in the USA many companies are in a money-grab. "We will fix it later", and the later becomes never. Because once you created 100 problems, you only 'invest' to fix the 'top 5' and only because an auditor/CISO told you so.
Also
> The app has since been banned in China after hosting conversations about alleged Uighur internment camps and other politically controversial subjects, which could clearly have put activists and dissidents at risk.
I see this argument sometimes for apps, and I feel like it should be made more clear that it's the Chinese government putting these people at risk of harm, not the apps.
Asking for security from a super-power state actor as a baseline for creating a social media app means only Facebook, Google, and Twitter get to ever make social media apps.
> The data referred to is all public profile information from our app, which anyone can access via the app or our API.” Davidson was essentially defending “scraping” — the practice of extracting publicly available, non-copyrighted data from the Web. Whether technically a breach or not, the incident has breached the trust of many of its users, who did not reasonably expect their information to be used in this way.
You can do the same thing with every Instagram account or Facebook or <insert basically every social media platform>. The platform is designed for people to be visible and share. You know that whatever you put in your bio can be seen by anyone on Clubhouse in a room you are in, or in search.
I don't see how this can be made private without defeating the whole purpose of the product. And I also don't see how this violates privacy when no such privacy was offered.
> Scraping is the same technique that controversial start-up Clearview AI, popular with law enforcement, has used to amass its facial recognition database.
It's also the same method used by Google to give you search results, like what the hell are we talking about here? Also Clubhouse didn't do any scraping. That's being lost here in this weird comparison.
> The audio app, only available to iPhone users, was designed and deployed with virtually no accommodations for individuals who are deaf, hard of hearing, visually impaired or who have certain other disabilities. Competitors such as Twitter Spaces, while not perfect, at least allow users to turn on captions and share transcripts, among other features, demonstrating that accessibility in audio apps is possible
Yea, because Twitter is a multi-billion dollar public company with an established and experienced engineering organization with top experts in AI. Clubhouse was started a year ago and only just started reaching hyper growth in January.
The contention here is you need to get this all correct out of the gate, which realistically only one of the big tech companies could actually pull off.
> And while it is one thing to ask people to go without their Facebook or Google products and services, now that these platforms have become so embedded in their daily life, it is another to ask them to abstain from Clubhouse. In this moment, before users have a compelling need to be on these platforms (because everyone else is there), and before Clubhouse becomes too big to fail, we still have a choice.
I'm confused, so we don't like that Facebook and Google own all of our digital interactions, but you also need to have Facebook and Google-level resources before it's ok for you to try launching a social media product?
Clubhouse reportedly turned down a $4b buyout from Twitter potentially, doing exactly what people have been saying they wish happened with Instagram or WhatsApp, but still they're doing it wrong.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't, I suppose.
Move on.
Btw Clubhouse being worth $4bn?! New Studio 54?