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Comment by exogeny | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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

> 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.

> 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.

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