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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

It's no surprise that Clubhouse values none of the things presented in the title because it's completely orthogonal to what makes Clubhouse 'valuable'. It's like saying "Elsevier is a billion dollar business despite being unfriendly to readers, researchers, and limiting access to human knowledge". No that's the reason, why in the logic of our economic system they have any price attached to them.

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.

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Except that's not true, having experienced it, I would say that ClubHouse produces intimacy as a service. I've had magical conversations on the application that I've never had anywhere else.

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.

It's hard for me to think of anything less niche than "like being at Stanford" given the extreme, tech-focused, affluent, bourgeois-as-fuck description that implies.

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.

> given the extreme, tech-focused, affluent, bourgeois-as-fuck description that implies

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?

> I prefer ClubHouse now

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.

> talking about a simple 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.

> 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.

That’s like saying Twitter and Facebook are just text messaging apps.

They have changed society.

Something can be both simple and revolutionary.

> They have changed society.

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 think most of us would agree that they've changed society for the worse.

I agree with this but I didn’t want to presume it, since there are positives too.

Do you not remember how stupid people thought Twitter was? I don't know how old you are, so you seriously may not.

Were they really wrong though?

Twitter is perhaps the biggest change in how people communicate in the 21st century so far. I would say that was a laughable underestimation. Would you like to expand on your point?

A drastic dramatic change needn’t mean that it’s not a stupid change.

Change for the better. Definitely not stupid.

I humbly beg to differ.

I don't make judgements on whether a global phenomenon is "stupid" or not, because frankly I think doing so is stupid itself. If everybody goes in a stupid direction, you can pretend it doesn't matter, but you'll be wrong.

Just because it isn't important and profound to you personally doesn't mean it's stupid. Whatever you mean by that word anyway.

You are objectively right and subjectively wrong.

As are you

My point exactly.

The difference is, way more people agree with me

Argument from popularity.

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.

> But there is no need to talk in such grandious terms, when talking about a voice chat app.

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.

I was making a general point. I wasn’t even talking about Twitter. Though I do agree that Twitter is simultaneously significant and has engendered a lot of stupidity. Many things throughout history have been both great and stupid.

To be fair, Twitter wouldn't have taken off if cell carriers hadn't been mind-blowingly incapable of evolving SMS.

SMS is a totally different protocol. It's a 1 to 1 framework, not a 1 to many, by default.

It's a 1:1 framework, because it didn't evolve.

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.

You seem to be confusing group chat with Twitter. And who exactly would "own the messaging space"? SMS is a protocol available to any carrier in any country.

I'm viewing both as a way to transport short messages from senders to receivers

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.

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

It wasn't impossible, but nobody did it. The lightbulb had been possible for many years before Edison commercialized it and made it feasible for the mainstream.

The way you are looking at things, the iphone isn't really an upgrade over the blackberry or palm pilot.

Palm didn't have 6+ years of iPod / iTunes profits to plow into R&D. And Blackberry's core customer didn't yet know they were interested in something like an iPhone: a mobile Bloomberg terminal was the apple of their eye.

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.

We're really not agreeing because I don't find it surprising that phone companies didn't invent Twitter, just like I don't find it surprising that Blackberry didn't invent the iphone

You're right that the protocol is nothing fancy, and that's what makes the 'plumbing' the most important factor. Twitter could be implemented as a pub/sub message queue. That's cool, but nobody would use it if there weren't a nice client and a controlled network to use it on.

Twitter is only important to the in-group that uses it. To them, it feels bigger and more important than it is because half of it is made up of bots and spammers inflating numbers and activity.

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.

That in group includes mainstream media journalists who report on it and influential people who read it and make decisions based on it. I can't believe you're making that argument with a straight face. We just had the Twitter president (who's been kneecapped by the Twitter ban, if you need another example of its power).

The ways Facebook, Insta, etc are being used now are heavily influenced by what Twitter started doing first.

Right, the tiny in-group of mainstream journalists and elites use it and place way too much weight on what's being said on the platform. Outside of that, most of America (& the world?) doesn't give a crap about what blue checks are saying. That doesn't stop journalists from twisting themselves into pretzels over what this or that person tweeted. I'm not saying it's not important and influential to the people using it, I'm saying those people think everyone else feels the same way and that's not the case.

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

Social networks do have magical properties to them but there's no playbook for how to create magic. They're in some ways no different than the magic people find in IRL communities. You can't force it. The early years of Reddit was an online experience that was really different than anything else out there at the time. Really high signal to noise, easily being able to find other people with people who shared your niche interests. Tumblr has that magic too and somehow managed to keep it but is focused on a demographic that is damn near the compliment to Reddit. Facebook and Twitter had and lost their magic. Among young and young-ish people TikTok currently has it, time will tell I suppose if it stays.

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.

You're telling me right now Clubhouse has no trolls, and you believe the reason for this is because it's hard to troll with voice? I'm pretty sure it's because trolls have simply never discovered it. Honestly, I would vastly prefer to be snarky to people in real-time with my voice and hear their immediate, unedited reactions.

For the first time I actually want to try Clubhouse.

> Honestly, I would vastly prefer to be snarky to people in real-time with my voice and hear their immediate, unedited reactions.

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.

I mean I already talk to scientists, engineers, artists and assorted people from across the world without Clubhouse. This has nothing to do with the people and everything to do with the platform. It sounds like fun to me.

Personally, your description of how you use Clubhouse sounds sad to me. Different strokes for different folks, my man.

Sounds like a gated internet community. Given the current state of online discourse, that’s understandable. But a little trolling, with the appropriate level of cutting wit, goes a long way towards skewering the bloviations of the thought leader class. It’s most unhackerlike to side with the mods.

Sounds like audio-only TED talks as a service, with all that entails.

Based on the comment above, it's closer to TED-X, or maybe TED-Y at this point

> 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

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.

> extreme, tech-focused, affluent, bourgeois-as-fuck description that implies.

Which is a highly desirable niche for many people.

> 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.

This sounds like a self-correcting problem if true.

It's not self-correcting at all. VC are incentivized to keep throwing money at these dumb ideas because if even one of them takes off, there are disproportionate returns to be had come IPO time.

> VC are incentivized to keep throwing money at these dumb ideas because if even one of them takes off, there are disproportionate returns to be had come IPO time.

Rich people funding low probability but high expected value moonshots is the system working as intended.

There's no intimacy, thoughtfulness or kindness in a proprietary software where a corporation can get the conversation and use it for its own means.

On the opposite, by being predators of user privacy they are hostile.

> Someone I know said that talking on ClubHouse felt like being back at Stanford.

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 am a high school dropout.

I'm happy to send you an invite. Message me on twitter.

I cannot afford an iPhone, sadly.

Clubhouse basically brings Silicon Valley style serendipity to the world. With work and social interactions increasingly being moved online and reaching remote people, the value prop of living in Silicon Valley is rapidly diminishing.

Not my experience. Clubhouse is more like C-tier people listening to B-tier people talking about A-tier people.

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.

I would say that ClubHouse produces intimacy as a service.

Intimacy as a sevice, the world's oldest profession... now backed by venture capital.

I'm sorry but the things you describe as selling points of the platform are merely byproducts of the argument you are replying to. Every gated and hyped community that gets a touch of the right people talking about it will feel very friendly and "high quality" for a while. The circumstance basically postpones the need for moderation.

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?

Great analogy to a closed alpha or beta for an online game. I played the WoW beta way back in the day - interactions with other players and the sense of community was completely different before vs after public launch. Perhaps related to the early adopter vs mainstream adoption in the innovation S-curve.

So basically, you are saying that the value of Clubhouse is the marketing they have done to make people use it in a certain way and attract some profiles?

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.

Or you can listen to a podcast?

> 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,

The broad audience being a bunch of Westerners on an iOS-only, invite-only app?

If you only talk about the tech behind it, then you're correct. However there is a scarcity of time and attention, which is what Clubhouse aims to capture. People want to be where things are happening. That's why land is abundant, yet I pay $2600 for a one-bedroom apartment in a city.

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.

Have you heard of Prelon and Small Steps, Giant Leaps?

https://prelon.org/

So their aim is to solve the societal problem of "How can we monetize the concept of FOMO". I see why it is both popular yet despised.

I don't think that's what it is. It's a bit hard to get an invite (although allegedly there's 10 million users now, so not that hard), but once you're inside, everything is open and free and accessible to anyone.

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.

You don't mean "orthogonal" (that would mean something like "independent", "non-interfering"). You mean it's "in direct opposition to" or something like that.

antithetical

NFTs only present an illusion of scarcity.

They are like picking up a grain of sand and trying to claim its rare. Yes, there is only one of that grain of sand you are holding but that doesn't mean a whole lot.

It means the same as any other valuable thing in our society caused by artificial scarcity - limited printings, trading cards, dollar bills, stamps, Bitcoin, software, music, books, etc.

With most of these things, its all about using the item as a status symbol. Having a rare painting on your wall shows status. NFTs don't and likely never will have the same impact.

The people who are buying them are absolutely buying them as a status symbol, so that appears to be working.

A great many people are starting to look down on NFT buyers and sellers. I'm not sure what status they provide since either someone has to maintain the chain somehow forever which is impossible, but also there isn't anything stopping someone from creating alternative timelines of sales.

Almost every status symbol is looked down upon by many people. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a group who admires it.

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.

Yeah but at least you'd have a baseball card. This is a number? I definitely get your point though.

I'm not sure why people buy NFTs, but I suspect they think it somehow implements digital rights management of a bill of sale, and it doesn't.

Except NFTs aren't artificially scarce, I'm not sure why people claim this. You can fork these chains just like how Bitcoin Cash was forked from Bitcoin.

But Bitcoin Cash has much lower unit value than Bitcoin, indicating people see them as different things. That seems to weigh heavily against your argument, rather than supporting it.

So if I sell an NFT how many third party sales forked off of how many subsequent sales should I consider official or not? Also, during the split, they were worth about the same, and you could sell one for the other on many exchanges. Is this what NFTs are supposed to be?

If you were asking me about details of NFTs, I have no idea, sorry. I was just disagreeing with the key point in your original argument

Except you can't copy a grain of sand, but you can endlessly fork a blockchain.

We don't have any realistic way to identify the grain of sand from others so the others may as well be the same thing except you have specifically blessed this one grain.

Okay, I get the comparison :P and perhaps I'm being overly pedantic we're both making the same point for sure.

I spoke on the app one night with a Chinese dissident about his experiences in the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Nowhere else is it possible to make that conversation happen right now except for Clubhouse.

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.)

I've played hundred of hours of gaming online, and ni all plateform with a voice chat, you could do that.

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.

I'm not sure it would be so easy to find a fifty-year-old who had been in the Tiananmen Square protests and who was playing WOW or Starcraft, but fair enough.

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.

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