Clubhouse downloads are falling | Hacker News Reader

Clubhouse downloads are falling

businessinsider.com

116 pointsgmays130 comments

They have a vouching problem, which Richard Feynman described the dynamic well in honor socieites, where once you were on the inside, most of the effort went into figuring out how to attract the people you wanted and continue to signal your status, while keeping others out.

I've been invited into quite a few exclusive social networks (scenes, clubs, societies, networks, etc.) and they all have a similar dynamic. There is a core group annointed by someone legendary who doesn't really participate much, a senate of old guard who run things in the background, some quirky legacies who are tolerated but marginal, a few social queen bee types who gatekeep and police the tone, and then a lot of social butterflies who promote and attract people into the gateway funnel. It's the model of leader/essentials/influentials/interchangeables model.

What I'd speculate happened (or will) is they didn't have a good funnel because the top influentials were too high stakes, and it creates the incentive for arrivistes to knock the ladder away behind them, which tanks growth. Clubhouse doesn't have enough privacy to invite your friend who might attract tone police attention, and growth depends on being able to select from those very people in a funnel.

Basically, the path from outsider to interchangeable to the more socially secure influential level is too unstable, and strivers won't invite their off-brand friends.

Where I have seen other networks and scenes grow is you need a lobby that is attractive to people, and then once you are on the other side of it, you are securely inside, at least the first level. It requires a layer of real privacy and privilege, and even relative secrecy. Maybe Clubhouse secretly has that now, but it's perhaps too secret, as this article is about how their funnel into their pipeline is drying up.

Compelling analysis. From reading meta-histories such as "Guns, Germs, and Steel" or "Sapiens", I get the impression that various organized religions exploited these same dynamics.

I always imagined that Karl Rove had a heavily marked-up copy of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" as he manipulated politics, paying particular attention to the sections on religion. This should also be required reading for anyone staking their livelihood on a social media startup.

I think any discussion of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" needs to come with the caveat that the author (Jared Diamond) is widely criticized by the greater historical/anthropological/poli-sci community for prioritizing narrative in his books over scientific accuracy.

"Guns" is still a good read, as long as you don't stop there.

This is quite the caveat. "Its a good book, except that all the testable claims made are false". Shouldn't that discredit the untestable "narrative" claims? Guns Germs and Steel is a Talmudic exercise in making stuff up to support the author's biases. Its only usefulness is as an example of how to make a superficially convincing case for something totally wrong.

https://www.bitchute.com/video/qvaxPH3ftUQ/

That a degree of geographical determinism exists seems pretty clear.

What's far less clear is that it was a simple as agriculture rose first on the Hilly Flanks. Game over.

Why the West Rules for Now is IMO correct when it basically says "Of course, the various factors Diamond discussed played a role but they're not the whole story. The book then goes on to show (based on a lot of data) how the Western Core and the Eastern Core actually switched leadership positions back and forth over time. I think it's fair to characterize his position as it was always going to be one of those two, but the West achieve its position solely because it was first.

>solely because it was first.

Why didn't Babylon industrialize? Or China or Egypt or Persia or India or Ethiopia or the Inca or the Greeks or Romans or Arabs or Nubians or Zulu or Mississippians or Ottomans or or or or or.

North-West Europeans did what we did because we chose to do the things necessary and others didn't. The only purpose of environmental determinism is to muddy the waters. If Africans had invented electricity and someone used specious arguments to belittle Africans by saying their accomplishment was nothing special because industrialization was inevitable in Africa because of how much rainfall they get you and I would recognize how racially motivated that is.

You're stopping way ahead. Things are done for reasons. Why did Africans not invent electricty?

Turkic peoples invented basic steam engines, so did the Greeks, why didn't they use them for anything?

Ultimately the reasons for this are going to come back to material reality, ie, your surroundings.

Actually, the universe is a closed thermodynamic system so the course of history and all decisions ever made by humans in the past and the future were completely determined by the initial energy density fluctuations of the big bang. It logically follows that we should let all criminals out of prison immediately because their crimes were purely an inevitable consequence of their environment. No one can be "guilty" of a crime he did not chose to commit. Likewise everyone should be given the same amount of wealth because the amount of studying and hard work you do is not a virtue deserving of reward, but an inevitability. Time is an illusion. Volition does not exist for one may recursively ask "why" until time collapses into a simple parameter of the function describing the state of the universe. The fact that we experience time at all is a fluke, an irrelevant mystery.

The same seems to go for Sapiens, albeit to a lesser degree, possibly as a result of being released more recently in 2015 vs the 90s.

Jared Diamond is actually the cover quote for Sapiens looking at my copy!

Can you expand on or link to such criticisms of Sapiens?

The classic so far seems to be C.R. Hallpike from an anthropological angle [0]

It’s 17 pages, but the general idea is basically ”whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong”.

And just in case anyone boxes & dismisses this as anthropology = social science = progressive relativist criticism, Hallpike is an 83 year old Oxford type who recently spent 200 pages [1] being very angry at popular modern ideas about the realities of primitive society.

[0] - http://www.hallpike.com/A%20review%20of%20Sapiens.pdf

[1] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42109085-ship-of-fools

I appreciate these links, thank you. I wish there could/would be a point by point response to the criticisms from Yuval, however. Humans have a predictable tendency to undermine each other, so it would be nice to easily see the counterpoints to the issues raised by other scholars who certainly have incentives to defend their life's investment in their biases, too.

As a scientist (not in anthropology), the feel of Sapiens was very unscientific. All assertions were made with minimum citation, and couched in "relevatory" language that always makes me feel that the author is hiding something.

If you want Sapiens but without these problems, try "Against the Grain" by James C. Scott. Covers much of the same material, but with many more citations from reputed journals and academics.

Like "Guns, Germs, and Steel", "Sapiens" spins a tale. True or not, I can see how these ideas could be dangerous in a mind like Carl Rove's. As a mathematician, I take ideas under consideration, to expand my imagination of what's possible. And as a would-be mountaineer, it has been explained to me how one needs to be able to tell six days of stories in case a snowstorm pins you inside your tent. These guys could clearly manage.

I'm considering "Against the Grain". The Audible narrator is an acquired taste (he hyper-articulates, and holds trailing vowels as if he's trying to establish his social class) but one can learn to tune this out.

Yes, "Guns" is wildly entertaining. Why we stopped at domesticating horses: Donkeys are only mildly irritable. If a Zebra bites you in the thigh your only option is to shoot it.

I sensed an intuitive truth to the instructions on manipulating people. And I sensed that Karl Rove was following this playbook. Whether it has scientific veracity, to my dismay it worked for him.

As for "Sapiens", I love how it's translated into so many languages. There's even an Audible version in Catalan. It's so much easier to learn a language when you know what the text is about to say.

I don't know about Rove, but Gingrich is famous for his love of the animal kingdom, and the fact that he views life and politics through that lens (a lens that is, imho, both very inaccurate, and a very obvious rationalization of the damage his life's work has caused, but nonetheless).

There's a lot of truth in this. Can you go deeper, what does: "they didn't have a good funnel because the top influentials were too high stakes, and it creates the incentive for arrivistes to knock the ladder away behind them,"

Thanks. If they stay too exclusive, they wilt. Social networks are basically gamefied social climbing, and so the strategies people employ are like teenagers trying to get invited to parties. To grow one, you need to give hope to everyone, opportunity to some, and access to few.

The (mimetic) distance of the valley billionaires and celebrities that clubhouse is famous for is too far from the Everyone, and that can create a negative feedback loop where normal people won't even try to join because there is no hope factor for them. Hence no funnel. The ones with opportunity to breathe that air are playing a pro game where they don't want to risk adding competitors or liabilities by inviting them.

To grow a platform, someone has to have a meta understanding of it and they can't just pretend it's cool for reasons nobody can understand because it just is. The users can't acknowledge this dynamic or even talk about the unspoken rules because the first rule is that that the rules are unspoken.

Growth doesn't come from getting a bunch of fancy people together, there just aren't enough of them to sustain anything, it comes from the bottom up. You need to extend the hope to a larger funnel so you can provide opportunities to some of them, and then select from the best candidates for access.

> If they stay too exclusive, they wilt.

Wouldn't other super-exclusive networks, like Ferrari owners or the American Express Centurion Card, also wilt for the same reason?

Are either of those things social networks? (I don't know what it's like to be a Ferrari owner or a Centurion. I assume that status / privilege is a big part of it, but not necessarily in the form of rank in a network).

I think those networks are based on things are useful without the social network, the network itself isn't something they use on an on-going basis (for example, I doubt Ferrari owners gather everyday to increase DAU numbers on an app, probably more like bi-monthly track meets which is fun by itself).

I'd argue that neither of those example networks (Ferrari owners or credit card holders) are exclusive because you can just join them with money.

Ferrari turns people down, even if they have money, as does Centurion.

Appreciate the thoughtful commentary.

I'm curious if you're suggesting that the only way for a new social network to overcome the "cold start" problem is to restrict access along some strata at the right ratio to incentivize the largest audience at the bottom to join?

Do you think a social network that starts off as entirely "open" to everyone would be challenged due to lack of a "fomo" factor, or is a quality product with the right vision enough?

There needs to be a lobby. It can be an open lobby, but it's the funnel. A new social network isn't something you just create, it's the effect of something else.

So it's not about restricting access, as that assumes an imaginary level of demand. It's about leveraging a core group to attract a larger crowd who you then selectively elevate into an in-group, typically based on competence and personal investment of some kind.

A "product," isn't a technology, it's the thing that meets a need, and if you don't have that need, your technology is meaningless. The need must be concrete, as there is no magic ratio that will fool people, even if there are a few theoretical ratios about equillibrium changes in networks.

This guy has thought a lot about it and articulates it better than I could in a comment: https://alexdanco.com/2021/03/19/how-scenes-work-with-jim-os...

> So it's not about restricting access, as that assumes an imaginary level of demand. It's about leveraging a core group to attract a larger crowd who you then selectively elevate into an in-group, typically based on competence and personal investment of some kind.

That makes sense, so finding, attracting, and retaining a core group of early adopters is really key.

> We talked about how startups are a scene, and why designing a local innovation economy from scratch – even if you think you ‘have all the incentives correctly’ – never works. (from the article)

That's a really interesting observation, and I tend to agree, perhaps the antithesis of "build it and they will come"?

Going to listen to the podcast now :D

Dang this is insightful. You have a clever understanding of social dynamics.

> and strivers won't invite their off-brand friends.

I haven't used it other than to listen to on initial thing, but when I was invited I thought it was basically like a Gmail invite. How does it reflect on the person who invited you in a meaningful way?

Vouching for someone to join Gmail is different than vouching for them to join a network a person has a significant social or professional stake in. In tech, we trade mostly (80:20) on competence, outside tech, people trade 80:20 on relationships and perceptions.

Since my upside doesn't come from those networks I can armchair QB it.

I'm just asking how so though? Does Clubhouse display a trail of who invited who publicly and also Clubhouse admins are actually going through and booting people that invited the "wrong" person (other than the normal stuff like that every site must do to remove networks of spam accounts/bots)?

No one "vouched" for you to join Gmail, the invite system was just a way of limiting the initial load or viral way of having people advertise it to each other depending on who is telling the story. I've never heard it as being to done to make sure the users were "vouched" for.

Couldn't say. It's about the perception, and some people understand that dynamic intuitively, others don't.

> Does Clubhouse display a trail of who invited who publicly

Yes

I don't think that new arrivals knocking down the ladder is the problem at all.

This is not a 'club trying to remain too clubby'.

It's more or less a thing that had viral appeal due to slight clubbyness, and has not been able to attract major content creators. Podcasters are staying away because they can't get paid.

The remaining content just isn't very good, and without the ability to 'time lapse' like every other platform (YouTube, TikTok) it means we have to struggle through the 99% garbage to get to the 1% 'good stuff' whereas TT and YT algorithms take care of that for us.

If Elon Musk stayed on, or, they were able to consistently get key industry insiders with promoted talks, then it 'might work'.

In short, the product just isn't that great, and what was originally appealing isn't working at any kind of scale.

Given the amount of money they've raised, and that the writing has been on the wall for some time, I'm really finding it odd they haven't secured much more consistently better content.

At very least, have 'serious investors' and 'media industry insiders' with known time-slots.

This sounds crazy but literally get Oprah a show, were she has 'open and honest, live conversations'. None of us would like that but a billion people would. They'd have to pay her a fortune... but they're at that level. Remember when YouTube sponsored presidential debates? That.

Really no. This isn’t about privilege, secrecy etc.

I invited a few people a couple of months back, and was a daily user for a short time.

Now I can’t find anything worth paying attention to so I am not visiting. I’m not going to bother inviting other people to something I don’t find useful.

It’s the same for everyone else I know who has used it.

That strikes me as the actual problem. It's just not a particularly compelling product. I'm amazed they got the buzz they did.

I find that with most social networks.... normal people ruin it. When twitter was all tech people it was great. Once the normies came in they ruined it. Same with clubhouse. When paulG and other tech luminaries were chatting overnight it was magic. Now it's garbage fake rich people.

Gonna state the obvious: it seems like you two came there for different reasons: being entertained (you) / meeting up with acquaintances (parent). Like YouTube versus WhatsApp?

I also met up with acquaintances - quite a few in fact.

I participated quite a bit, but all of my acquaintances have stopped showing up too, even one who is a professional influencer.

A compelling analysis, but what if they are just reaching a plateau of users with their current product?

From the limited data provided by the article, their retention looks good, which matters more in the long run.

Depends on whether their product is a cool social network or a voice bridge. Twitter and other text/image social networks scale because there was no opportunity cost to following someone, whereas participating in a conf is a time sink and reputation bid. The comments on this thread talk about how it's not fun, so some users are disengaging. Clubhouse's retention numbers wouldn't give the more meaningful info about DAU/MAU, which are about the engagement that necessarily drives the network growth.

Absolutely armchairing this, but stories about people in their target market winning the fame lottery or some other jackpot on it would drive that funnel. The way society pages used to do it was gossip columnists and blind items written by people who had skin in the game so they wouldn't upset the applecart. (Vice can't swing that because their whole schtick is sympathy for people who disgust themselves, so there's no desire there) Clubhouse doesn't have to reproduce that era of media, but they could learn some stuff from it.

> There is a core group annointed by someone legendary who doesn't really participate much, a senate of old guard who run things in the background, some quirky legacies who are tolerated but marginal, a few social queen bee types who gatekeep and police the tone, and then a lot of social butterflies who promote and attract people into the gateway funnel. It's the model of leader/essentials/influentials/interchangeables model.

I recently started a new role at a large Enterprise after having worked in startups for the past 10 years and have been annoyed by the culture in the company. What you describe seems to fit more or less my feelings about the business. There is the typical clique around the CEO of bonus collectors, they want to hire loads of people "to go faster" and do things "different" but at the same time people who have been there for a while (often a long time) want to keep people out so they can keep working in sleepy town and have business as usual. etc. A similar dynamic. Interesting.

I think that's a combination of "I want to lose weight without really changing anything" and "We want to reward loyalty by tying promotions to tenure...until you're no longer useful and we can sack you at a moments notice in an unfortunate cost-reduction exercsie."

I have thought, in my experience, that the c-suite would be smart enough and savvy enough to see this, and even be incentivized to do something about it, but...maybe not. It's kind of the water we swim in, after all. I recall once having the elevator door open as I was about to rush out, only to be blocked an entourage of peeps surrounding one of the founders about to step in...

From my experience in large companies the c-level is highly political, below even more so, as the ways to be promoted is limited.

Promotions are typically group decisions making politics a requirement.

Yes. And if the promotion possibilities are limited, every competitor you knock out, increases the chance for you to be promoted. On the c-level it's more about budgets, reorgs and getting ownership over more topics (power) - every competitor you make look bad will not get more budget, will not get new responsibilites, will not get the new department.

Many people at the top of large organizations got there by knocking out many others, the most political are able to rise to the top over time.

Luckily I came into c-level positions by startup growth, byouts and acquisitions, not by going through the ranks.

> that the c-suite would be smart enough and savvy enough to see this, and even be incentivized to do something about it

Some do better than others. But ultimately it’s the same behaviors in different packaging. Everyone is competing for face time with the chiefs. Everyone is trying to sound the smartest and most insightful. Everyone has to critique or ask for follow up action items; otherwise the meeting was a waste of time.

The chiefs like to be around people the relate with. Let’s bond on our shared interest in watches, sports, travels, homes, cars, etc. and it adds pressure to the rising class of veeps to like all of those things as well. After all, what else are you going to do with your bonus?

The bigger problem is that without exclusivity, it’s not compelling.

Outside of music, audio is always the loser mass media. Radio 1.0 atrophied when TV became affordable. The second generation of shock and right wing talk radio is eroding away to more extreme social media and hyper targeted podcasts. Where does clubhouse fit other than a more niche, locked down spin on a podcast.

Reminds me of David Chapman’s “ Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution”

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

Not surprised. I gave it a shot early on, but it just wasn't for me. Listening to a bunch self-proclaimed "thought leaders" tell almost biblical tales about their struggles that lead to their dubious success, followed by an "ok, let's reset the room" and then a bunch of back patting about how great and positive the group is, and then starting over again was just cringe inducing and painful.

The ONLY Clubhouse use I found actually interesting was when the developer behind Hacking with Swift used it to hold mock iOS developer interviews, inviting attendees to step up and try to answer a mock interview question.

Of my friends who Clubhouse did appeal too, many were hooked for a couple of weeks. Today none of them use it at all anymore. The consensus is generally "it was interesting at first, but now it's really boring."

>Listening to a bunch self-proclaimed "thought leaders" tell almost biblical tales about their struggles that lead to their dubious success, followed by an "ok, let's reset the room" and then a bunch of back patting about how great and positive the group is

I don't understand how there's so little criticism about this desire to keep such (apparently) valuable knowledge from "thought leaders" confined to an exclusive club. I always sensed the overwhelming consensus among us all (tech people, namely) was that such information should be made free and accessible? Is being a member of some dumb hyped up app really more interesting for so many of us?

Probably because it reduces the amount of said "thought leaders" on other platforms. In my opinion, the signal-to-noise ratio isn't great.

It's because the knowledge isn't that valuable usually. It's prized because of its exclusiveness. Most anyone who describes themself as a thought leader is probably full of hot air.

A more cynical person might suggest it's like how much of the success attributed to college isn't what one learns as much as the connections one makes.

> I always sensed the overwhelming consensus among us all (tech people, namely) was that such information should be made free and accessible?

I don't think there is. But that's partly because "tech people" is now such a big tent. Open source folks would probably agree with that statement. Folks pushing startups towards hockey stick growth.. maybe less so.

The emperor has no clothes.

I don't really care about Clubhouse one way or another but if your article uses the phrase "falling off a cliff" I think you should have a graph where you can see that cliff.

Jan: 2.4M

Feb: 9.6M

Mar: 7.2M

Apr: 0.9M

You've transposed the numbers for March. It was 2.7M in the article.

  Jan: 2.4M
  Feb: 9.6M
  Mar: 2.7M
  Apr: 0.9M

(edit: and I replicated the error facepalm)

"Clubhouse saw about 922,000 downloads globally in April, a 66% dip from 2.7 million installs in March and a surge of 9.6 million in February, a Sensor Tower spokesperson shared with Insider."

A graph would have been handy, but I would say a 2/3 reduction in new installs qualifies as a cliff. They note however that retention is ostensibly strong, so this cliff might not be as scary as it sounds, at least in the short term.

At least the google trends graph [1] very much deserves the phrasing

[1]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=clubhouse

I find it very interesting that this app's search traffic is most popular in Mongolia and China. I wonder if it's mostly bots and I wonder how popular Clubhouse actually is amongst real people.

I suspect it is fairly popular. Some of my friends who use Clubhouse talk about listening to groups of tea farmers in China talk about tea. Voice chat is very popular in China anyway, since it is easy and accessible to people who have not learned an IME. Add the fact that things iPhone and exclusive are popular and I am not surprised the concept can do well.

What the hell China and... Mongolia?

It’s hard not to think of this twitter thread from almost 2 months ago which laid a compelling case for how it would go down.

Threaded: https://threader.app/thread/1371972261004070913

Twitter: https://twitter.com/shaanvp/status/1371972261004070913

They went crazy with their notifications. They had levels of contact and at the lowest level my phone was alerting me about content that i didn't find relevant more than any app, including the phone and text messaging. They ended up annoying me off the platform

This is how all social media apps eventually work.

Apps know you get an endorphin rush every time a notification comes. Even if the notification doesn't show anything relevant, it MIGHT be important so you hurry to open it.

I had to quit these apps over this, maybe some people are able to handle constant meaningless stimulation, but I can't.

I aggressively turn off notification privileges from apps. One "engagement" notification and they are gone. Works a treat.

I don't know how people who get notified about everything manage. For me it's basically just text messaging and calendar.

They don't.

Anxiety is though the roof. I don't waste time arguing about this, but I don't use social media / online dating. It wasn't good for me emotionally.

I've still done very well meeting people.

Yep. The first week I joined clubhouse I spent >10 hours on the platform, it was fascinating to see high profile people drop into rooms and be able to participate in ad hoc conversation with them.

But the notifications were constant. Once I turned them off, I forgot about the app almost completely.

After I did this, I realized how little time I had to allocate to hearing other people banter. It's already the case that I miss some great podcasts because of time constraints. It also started to seem like an audio-version of Twitter with all of the negativity and in/out group dynamics that are common there.

Same story with me. I got overwhelmed with the notifications and turned them off.

App disappeared from my brain after that.

Maybe I'm too cynical but Clubhouse always felt like a weird pyramid scheme. It was huge solely because a core group of people said it was huge. VCs hyping a VC investment to a sky-high valuation and bringing lots of VC-aspiration little people along with them as reinforcement.

And I guess it worked, they got a valuation of $4bn! But now what?

Yep, this is my exact feeling. Really felt like Ben Horowitz fell in love and maybe coaxed/cut-in his rapper friends to help push this real quick.

Maybe one of his buddies kept saying “yo Ben, when can I make an investment just like Ashton Kutcher or Bieber?!”

Heavy lies the crown

A16z has been doing this Substack for months. First it was the disingenuous blog post from one of their partners about how "100 True Fans"[0] can make you monetize your content Then they started paying journalists to post on Substack, while writing pieces about how media bureaucracy is chasing away top talent, who are "choosing" (aka being paid) to write on Substack.

[0]: https://a16z.com/2020/02/06/100-true-fans/

Eh, tornado chasing "thought leaders" and "influencers" can only get so many people interested in a product before reality comes knocking. After the gimmick is gone, it's just another poor product with little to offer.

There was so much promise. After a year of quarantine I had 5 of my most interesting non work/family conversations of the year in a one week period. There was no real way for me to connect with those people without wading into the morass of twitter or instagram. I tried to build a tool (https://inof.me) to help people connect by providing an invitation and an asking for an offer. No one was really interested...it needed to be integrated into the platform to work. I couldn't block topics. I couldn't search for terms of active channels. I couldn't politely ping interesting people and ask if they'd like to set up a time to chat.

I love talking about decaying currency, certain(non-NFT) blockchain topics, Longhorn football, some philosophy topics, etc and I'll talk to anyone about them most all of the time if I can find a conversation partner(especially during quarantine). I had no real way to make those connection on clubhouse even though I had spoken with interested folks previously.

Most of all, I couldn't catch up. If an amazing conversation happened that you were late to...too bad. You couldn't explore and find if the person speaking was really trustworthy by looking at their back catalogs.

I wanted a clubhouse that lets me pay $9.99 a month to have access to a back catalogs that will let me listen to the interesting conversations that occurred in the past about very long-tail specific topics. Then I want to star those people with different color stars and notification levels so that if they start talking again I can quickly see what kind of conversation it is and jump in. If I'm late I want to back up 30 minutes and listen at 1.75x until I'm caught up. Give me the knobs and dials to customize my experience.

Guy Raz makes a good point in the How I Built This episode with the Clubhouse founders. You can have a really interesting conversation with someone but that conversation doesn’t necessarily make good radio that’s interesting to others.

So much of that catalog would be gurus repeating the same stuff over and over again. It would be so hard to sort through all of it to the find interesting parts.

I think it’s wonderfully interesting to be pulled into the conversations of people I look up to because it feels genuine. But once the masses join the platform, everything becomes so curated to specific topics that it loses the magic. It isn’t any better than a badly produced podcast or blog.

Live audio and video will still be the future but this isn’t it. Or, isn’t yet.

I'm personally turned off by the live nature of it. In the same way that I don't particularly like voice messages.

At least with text (even in chat rooms), you can edit and condense. Also I dont have anything particularly interesting to say and I don't want to listen to blowhards who think they do.

Not exactly sure what their strategy around room discovery is. I can't search all rooms. I can't block key words. Is this just for lack of engineers, or is it some galaxy brain scheme to keep me engaged?

I can’t imagine it’s a lack of engineers. They’ve raised over $100m dollars. That’s a lot of well paid engineers. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/clubhouse-voice

I agree and find this is the largest problem I face on clubhouse. Room discovery is hard. Titles and descriptions are often poorly written and inaccurate. I also often find the conversations to be far less insightful and interesting than I expected.

I was hoping there would be more interesting discussions and lectures. Instead many rooms often feel a bit like a circle jerk for the hosts.

Perhaps this is an issue in Clubhouse's ability to validate who people are. I have no idea if the person speaking is actually credible. Maybe Twitter spaces will be better since they have the blue check mark system and I can have confidence that the people speaking are known to some degree.

The design of Clubhouse doesn't start with rooms: it starts with people. You follow people you want to listen to, and when they happen to be in rooms--rooms either they started or that were started by someone they know who they follow and so they joined and were invited on stage--you get notifications and see those rooms on your list. You don't go into Clubhouse searching for rooms--they didn't even try to add features to let you rhino about rooms until December, and it frankly felt like they simply gave up on their vision--you search for people. (FWIW, that a system where you value people above content, and where rooms largely fork out of cliques of people who want to be associated with each other's followers, leads to "a circle jerk for the hosts", as you call it, might be obvious... at least in retrospect ;P.)

Utility is gone, and all that's left is crypto scammers and "entrepreneurs" selling Amazon dropshipping master classes.

When Clubhouse is acquired or implodes, it will serve as a cautionary tale on how quality control is an essential element of social media.

"Quality control" for some would be "censorship" for others.

If nothing else, that would at still be enough for a HN post with several hundred comments.

Search engines use ranking functions to promote higher quality content, while allowing determined users to still find the obscure, unpopular, trashy and dangerous.

They just needed a decent search/recommendations engine.

There is a lot of meeting fatigue due to WFH. People are probably preferring async platforms. Imagine spending an hour only to find it waste.

How many times do I have to hide rooms about “Worship and Prayer” or “Manifest Infinite Wealth” before clubhouse will get the hint?

Clubhouse was lightning in a bottle. It also proves that some things just can't scale, no matter how much money and star-power you can throw at it.

What's old is new...

I remember around 2006 Skype had a feature that allowed you to "host" talks. The community made some interesting channels, and I used to participate in some of them. Eventually the feature was dropped, and I haven't found a place that could substitute that. But yeah, that's a feature, not a product.

This is a good thing to consider. I'm setting a reminder for myself in ten years to create a clubhouse clone. If one exists then I'll just snooze another decade.

Quora was an interesting example of that. They seeded it with some big names, especially from venture capital and Silicon Valley culture. That attracted a lot of eyeballs quickly, and for a while, some very good content (mostly not from the big names but from its diverse user base, and some good writers achieved notoriety).

That wasn't very lucrative, and they've spent the last few years spending that goodwill to attract lower-quality content but more page views. Eventually that will cause its hard-earned SEO to drop off, but today they seem to feel its the best way to monetize what they developed from that early money and star-power.

Q&A does scale. As much as people shit talk StackExchange, they have done an excellent job keeping the platform high quality and it's leaps and bounds ahead of any other Q&A platform.

did clubhouse have any star power?

Depending on how you define star power, it had Musk, Rogan, among 100s of other well known celebrities in the early days. Not sure if any of those stuck around, but they certainly attracted the right people early on.

Ah, I thought you mean star-developer/employees. Yes they had some big names, although I heard Joe Rogan went on it once and said he wouldn't go back on it.

I didn't feel like hunting through my network for an invite, so I'm still waiting for my sms to sign up. They should have scaled their inviting quicker if they didn't want alienate people and lose them.

When I heard that they were going to monetize with 'tipping' my heart sank. If ever there was an opportunity for 'a rising tide lifts all boats' style social experiment, clubhouse was it. Charge a subscription, let people listen to long tail content that interests them, pay the people that get listened to. You incentives the creation of interesting conversations. It would have been like a giant long tail podcast generator where serendipity and intellect could spin out a lot of new ideas. Boo.

Really interesting to see these numbers knowing they just closed a round that valued them at $4 billion. a16z had to have seen this trend coming. I wonder what they’re seeing that we aren’t.

They're in a delusional silicon valley bubble.

They just made $10 billion on Coinbase, they can afford a lot of misses.

Wins and loses do not cancel each other out. When you win you win when you lose you lose but I can agree that at the end of the day balance sheet is what matters. Cryptocoins are fad, technology and concepts behind them are important. Coinbase is nothing but a bucket shop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market)

I signed up for the novelty of it but it’s not what I hoped it would be, or perhaps I just haven’t found the right rooms. I really hoped this was more of a salon in the old Victorian way. Gather to listen to someone lecture. I would pay for that to hear good speakers lecture in private without fear or worry of disruption etc.

What would be the benefit over podcasts / video recordings of lectures?

I'd guess an ability to ask questions after the lecture.

This piece is missing. The audience can't do much. They should at least have chat while people are on stage. Seems like an obvious feature to increase participation.

This is actually something that both Twitch and Youtube can do fairly well. Several science Youtubers put on lectures for school students studying from home, it's a nice format.

Of course that's video... but at least with the YouTube subscription you can listen to the audio without the video.

Maybe their top influencers were being sincere†. Maybe it was very good and convenient app for them, perhaps because it acted as a good voice recorder / orchestration tool for their podcasts. What they didn't realize is that the listeners have a totally different viewpoint

† I think a lot of it was paid publicity

Ben Thompson has some intelligent comments on this, and what he got wrong, here:

https://stratechery.com/2021/market-making-and-time-horizons...

Reminded of this Twitter thread from a couple months ago about how this will all go down: https://twitter.com/ShaanVP/status/1371972261004070913

Clubhouse reminded me of the description in Neuromancer of the trends (I think the relevant example was the Panther Moderns) that emerge out of nothing, become prominent, and then disappear within a couple weeks.

It's not at all surprising that this happens with a social network, what I find more interesting is that there is a better opportunity to capitalize on it by purposely embracing "disposability" and grabbing some value out of it as it runs its course, instead of insisting that it be a longer term play that demands a bunch of VC funding and whatever demands come with trying to maintain that valuation.

I think Clubhouse is great in many ways. It’s initial rawness and authenticity and the lack of gatekeepers. They failed to come out with an Android version in over a year after so much funding, and now in their iOS markets they are battling the return to normalcy with vaccinations and the opening up of societies.

I see the lack of an Android app as a feature. People who really want to use it will just get a cheap iPhone, I gave Android using friend my old iPhone 7. Most of the fun is the mix of exclusivity while still being able to chat with B-tier celebrities on a whim. Supporting Android means more users, which means we will have to sift through even more “Hodl BTC Gamestonk xD” rooms to get to the interesting rooms.

If your social network relies on having less users to be good, you might have a problem in your long-term business model(especially considering the funding they've already gotten).

How is that not a viable business model? Who says every social network has to be for everybody?

This idiotic elitist mentality serves no one.

You aren't special because you purchased a product made by the largest consumer product company on the planet.

Funny, more users is exactly what they need.

I wonder how CH users breakdown geographically in the US. Things here on the west coast, at least in Oregon, are very much not open at any normal capacity and won’t be for at least several more months, assuming no more spikes.

I wouldn’t think they’d be seeing such a sharp decline in interest based on a few states allowing normal operations.

Is it on android yet?

This data is from a nice shady company, Sensor Tower: https://www.cnet.com/news/sensor-tower-used-vpn-ad-blocking-...

Shady as in the data is unreliable or shady as in you have an ethical disagreement?

Ethical, although I suspect the data is also not too great: it's the subset of users using questionable VPN apps.

Good enough to determine that Clubhouse story is accurate though, most likely.

So ad hominem attack not relevant in any meaningful discussion.

I had clubhouse for nearly two days on my phone before I removed it, and that was a day more than Tinder managed to survive.

I simply could not find anything interesting to listen to on Clubhouse.

Perhaps I am not an "App" person.

And without a sharing option or being able to login from a website it is very limiting & unnecessary device app installation needed

It was laughable how despite Agora having Android SDKs they were not able to bring in an Android version

I was curious to get started until I heard of their serious disregard for user privacy.

is as simple as when you need people to constantly scheduling for hour long non pro live talk shows, it isn’t gonna work. You may get a few heavy hitters, but most are just random people chiming in. The drop off is high.

I wanted to hear Elon Musk talk to Vladimir Putin.

Instead it’s like I stumbled into some kind of weird new age multi level marketing crypto mega church summit.

Huh, the novelty of a sweaty, desperate conference call where you try to get the attention of some venture capitalist wore off quickly.

Who would have thought?

$4B

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