Clubhouse Is a Cargo Cult
ianvanagas.com
ianvanagas.com
A16Z seemingly thought simply by telling everyone how excited they were about Clubhouse they could turn Clubhouse into being something to be excited about. The problem being that the reality undermined them though - just as they were telling people to be excited about the innovative conversations on Clubhouse, the number one story was some CEO getting arsey about a journalist reporting the news- a fundamentally petty and narcissistic look for an App that needed to be seen as cool and new. So Elon and co did their "Oh look at us we're early adopters dance" but never invested in the platform - because there was never a reason to, and that failure to give a value proposition to the people they wanted to harvest value from was their core issue.
Sounds like early-stage Quora.
An example I still remember. Someone asked How much it cost for AOL to distribute all those CDs in the 90s... and Steve Case answered!
https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-it-cost-AOL-to-distribute...
You ask a question - when did Titanic sink? And usually the answers would be someone talking about how (in)accurate the film is. They’d talk about where they went to college. They’d talk about their exes and how they missed the last bus home after they watched the film with their ex. If they’re in the mood you’ll also get to learn about mangoes and furniture. Things like what’s the chemical formula of water and then that of ice after enacting a cliffhanger. Or secret knowledge such as ice is kinda harder than water. And some lamenting thoughts such as it was all the fault of ice. They were at the wrong time in the wrong waters. They might have forgotten about mentioning the day when Titanic sank. Good part is by now you would have forgotten that as well.
It's impossible to do that with Clubhouse, because people are joining to hear the rich and famous speak, and the rich aren't going to set up residencies on some app.
The idea of listening to party-line style conversations isn't totally insane. Hypothetically good content could be created this way, and it seems that happened at least a few times. But the product was and is just awful.
The discovery function sucks, it's just a crappy stream of mostly low-value hustle culture nonsense that feels like mid-2000's junk mail subject lines. There's no way (that actually works) to change that to something that guides you to decent content.
There's an alternate version of this story where they had a really great technical founding team that reacted to the influx of users and hype by really rapidly iterating on the product and making everyone have a great experience.
Instead everyone signed up via exclusive invite and spent a few rounds trying to figure out why they fuck they should care and eventually gave up because they shouldn't.
I honestly think it's one of the most perverse ideas in a long time. We built the internet, a tool of frictionless communication, where everyone can talk to everyone without the limits of the physical world, and what do we get, a nightclub with artificial room size limits so people can brag about attending a virtual cocktail party with Elon Musk
Which of course is an admirable thing to do! Listening to well-crafted presentations by learned experts and expanding your knowledge is fantastic!
But of course we know how that went - participation in TED quickly became a status marker (not helped by the exorbitant cost of tickets), and the organization capitalized by spinning off TEDx talks all over the world that ended up being filled with more charlatans and hucksters than genuine experts... which seems to have been the direction Clubhouse has also gone.
It's a bit sad - I think Clubhouse could have been something great - though arguably the "listen to experts talk" thing is better fulfilled by podcasts than a live format. Maybe what the world needs isn't a live streaming platform but an authoring tool that makes it really easy to get people together to talk, record a podcast, and distribute it. The bar to podcasting has been lowered a lot in recent years, but it's still substantial to produce a quality product.
I think there's also something to be said here for FOMO and what I've taken to calling "the unknowability of ideas" - I think genuinely investors have no idea why some ideas succeed (see: Facebook), but are terrified of missing out on the next big thing. The combination of this is that many SV VCs seem to regard the quality of ideas as unknowable - you can never pooh-pooh anything, because the last thing you thought was shite turned out to be a multi-billion dollar company, and therefore ideas are literally unjudgeable. The FOMO seems to induce a lot of hype over some companies/products even though the people doing the hyping themselves don't seem to understand why.
Just look at the hype at the peak of the mania: [0]
They orchestrated and they (a16z) got others to hype the app that raised $1B and they don't even explain why it is that valuable.
They tried to exit to Twitter and it fell through. Now the hype squad panics and immediately injects billions into Clubhouse totalling it to $4B valuation, which I do not understand and they start spamming the notifications in the app.
This is what they do. This is what the hype squad does and they did it well with Clubhouse. Well played; Except I saw all through the hype.
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/jasonfried/status/135741388036900...
Come to think of it, isn't all celebrity news like this? People who are famous because they are famous?
The exception is a weekly room I was invited to by a friend. That room has been amazing. I've met people, had fun and interesting conversations, and gotten a lot of value out of the app.
So Clubhouse is using one mechanism that's probably Almost Right, the "follows," to help discover rooms that are going to be worth your time. This then creates a status game, and it's very real; our weekly room had a million-follower person get on stage for about 15 seconds, and we suddenly had 1000+ people in the audience. It was a bit like a Twitch raid from a popular streamer.
> Now that high status people can be seen in person again, they are spending less time on Clubhouse. Lower status people are left trying to be seen amongst themselves. Without high status people, Clubhouse is not serving its purpose of helping people be seen. It is a cargo cult: low status people recreating the actions of high status people, after they have left, thinking it will cause them to be high status.
I have to agree. Clubhouse imploded around February and it's been a sad scene since then.
Look at Discord, Facebook / Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Spotify, Telegram, and even small startups like 'Public' have treated it like a feature, which is why Clubhouse is losing users.
The only daily active users there are a16z and the same VCs of Clubhouse. I still don't know why it is worth $4B.
And now Slack, with Slack Huddles [0]
[0] https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/4402059015315-Int...
I think the article does a good job backing up their theory about why clubhouse’s network effect has evaporated. People were there because it was a great way to show status during the pandemic. Now that other status displaying activities have opened up, they’ve left it en masse.
Anecdatapoint: I don't recall hearing anyone talk about Clubhouse - or at least not in enough detail that it actually stuck with me what it was - before this post.
I may live under a small rock, but others must be under here with me. Some app? Okay, moving on. Sometimes the network effect is so focused that the in-network and the out-network can't perceive each other.
Given that Clubhouse peaked in January - February 2021 [0], where were the Android users at the time then?
[0] https://9to5mac.com/2021/02/18/clubhouse-reaches-8-million-d...
The problem is, the market Clubhouse is trying to create is a Wild West without near-perfect content curation. It's going to fail a hundred times before taking off and when it does it's not going to be as big as everyone though initially, much like groupon.
lol, that's not even the biggest problem. This is a service known to send identifiers as cleartext[0], among other privacy and security flaws[1].
[0] https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/clubhouse-china
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/clubhouse-privacy-security-growt...
It was the lack of an Android app for more than a year (Android accounts for more than 70% of marketshare worldwide) [0], plus they have kept the invite system in place even when all their competitors have already cloned them to death.
Finally on top of that, the end of lockdowns for hundreds of millions, worldwide and getting back to normal.
By the time all of that was phased out and the Android app released, everyone went back to Twitter, Discord and Reddit and the Clubhouse hype died.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272698/global-market-sha...
And that is already solved well by a weekly repeating zoom meeting
And it's more limited than video, you're limited to sound only.
Basically need to spend multiple minutes to understand what's going on and whether is worth it or not
Most of the clubhouse influencers treat it as a low-effort way to just start a channel and brain dump whatever's on their mind compared to curated/planned content that you see on Youtube or high quality blog posts. In fact that's how it was sold to marketers (low effort, high yield).
And this is a good thing. I recently did a room with an optics engineer from NASA who made the optics for Cassini’s Composite IR Spectrometer. And now the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and the Vera Rubin Observatory. The conversation went into exacting depth, with all of us enjoying it a lot and learning along the way. It felt like a salon, not a club.
Earlier I was doing a room with the discoverer of 2014 UN271, the largest comet discovered so far. The Chief Scientist of NASA joined in and we spent an hour discussing possible missions through this ancient comet’s plume.
The discoverer of the object got to meet NASA’s Chief Scientist to talk about his baby, and NASA’s Chief Scientist got to nerd out with us on the largest comet ever found.
We also talked about algorithms etc for better finds.
These conversations exist. They often happen in private. Or in clubs like Small Steps & Giant Leaps. There weren’t more than 40 people in the “room” and if you’d had raised your hand, we’d have pulled you up to nerd out with us.
I started joining these rooms, then talking in them, and now I host them.
If you're on discord, use the link on our twitter to join :)
Twitter gives a social graph, and an asynchronous way to get to know people (accounts, really, one of the signatures of Twitter is how normal pseudonymity is).
Spaces then gives the ability to throw together a little Clubhouse (synchronous voice chat) on top of that.
My bet is that this works better as a feature, not a platform, and that the rise of Clubhouse was in fact an artifact of the pandemic. We'll see what happens.
Except Snapchat was able to use their position and funding to invest in AR. Now they've got an incredibly compelling lead in that space.
It'll be interesting to see what VR/AR/XR/metaverse products that Apple and Facebook have in the pipeline will do to that lead.
Every fledgling idea and initiative everywhere uses borrowed or pooled money and tries to go viral by doing their ambiguous "marketing" on those platforms. If you don't, your stakeholders will blame you.
Dabbling in VR is a tiny tiny tiny part of why the story works right now. Big maybe about the future. But its a rounding error right now.
Where Clubhouse is concerned, it's just... not social enough. If you load it when you don't know something special is happening, and just wander into random rooms, the chance of disappointment is high.
In that moment, it isn't competing with Twitter Spaces, it's competing with podcasts. I would bet most users of Clubhouse also listen to podcasts, and the chance that they can load up some audio that they know will be interesting is pretty high.
So Clubhouse's social network is weak. You can't just flip through Clubhouse real quick when you're stuck in line, and even when you have some time to kill, it's a crap shoot whether you'll find something fun. Where it really shines is special events, but that's not much of a moat.
Twitter and Spaces is synergetic, since Twitter is always there, ready to offer you an infinite scroll of witticism, cute cat pictures, and the Main Character of the Day. It's ok if Spaces is kind of useless unless there's a special event.
There's also the serendipity effect where you can be scrolling the timeline and see someone say "hey we're hanging out on Spaces", and just pop over.
Clubhouse has a head start, and some remaining halo effect, but no real moat, nothing to keep the conversation on Clubhouse. The big draws on Clubhouse all have Twitter accounts, they can try out Spaces any time they want. If it works for them, they switch, and if enough of them switch, it's over.
It's not inevitable, but it is something I'm starting to see happen in the circles I frequent.
He also hosts a space with other developers to discuss it each week. I usually listen in as well.
So I'll ask: was Clubhouse ever all that popular? One doesn't need to be very cynical to understand why it started as invite-only. Were they able to leverage that FOMO into anything resembling a user base? Or is this just 2021's more complicated cousin to the Yo app[0], in that there's a bunch of hype up front but no real substance? TFA makes it sound like it's the app for narcissists and their hangers-on.
Is it because the authorities are unaware of it and haven't blocked it, so there's a brief window where uncensored conversations can take place?
Something like that happened with Clubhouse in China: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/08/world/asia/china-clubhous...
I suspect it's a lot of small things and social network multiplicative effect
It's all just manufactured excitement. A new vehicle for influencers to pump content. If you're not an influencer, or not interested in listening to influencers, there's really nothing there for you.
Honestly I have the same doubts and still can't help but come to the conclusion that it wasn't much besides a very aggressive marketing campaign. It felt like every post about Clubhouse had that one person talking about how lifechanging and unique Clubhouse was supposed to be using variations of the same examples.
Also the period of many articles that tried to tell us about the massive success. Given how extremely fast that fad died I can't help but come the conclusion that the Clubhouse hype was mostly artificial.
Shows how disconnected investors and tech news can be from reality. Seems to me like way more people talked about Clubhouse than actually used it.
So I lost interest and stopped using it.
But it’s hard to tell from an experience like that, if it’s indicative of CH as a whole or if I just ended up in the wrong circles on CH.
Compare to Reddit for example, I subscribe to very specific subreddits that are about my interests and generally have good luck finding interesting things to read and to watch on Reddit. Whereas if all you ever saw was the front page of Reddit, you’d have a very different experience. So maybe CH is the same way, maybe there is some really good stuff I am missing out on, who knows. And maybe it’s all trash. Either way, I’m not inclined to spend any more time on CH in order to try and find something that may or may not exist. Chasing Nessie or Big Foot would be more productive use of my time :p
However, if someone told me about some actually good rooms then it’d be different and I’d be willing to check those out. So I’m not completely writing it off. Just saying, I’m not going to spend more time there on my own trying to find good rooms.
I remember, a few years ago, the entire tech press being unabatedly abuzz about Bloom Energy. It confused me until I realized it was a press pool coördinated by Sequoia. The gushing about Clubhouse may be organic. But Andreessen Horowitz bet big on the company. They're one of the media savvier shops on Sand Hill.
I had some great conversations with people on it. What I liked about Clubhouse was the serendipity of the conversations and the spontaneity.
If Clubhouse made it easy to record it would create a permanent stream of podcasts and YouTube audio recordings that would virally bring more and more people to the platform.
Instead of Clubhouse I use Zoom for my podcast interviews. Would have preferred Clubhouse. The Zoom setup is so straightforward. Meanwhile Clubhouse seems to be hostile to the idea.
The fact this statement was meant to be negative rather undermines everything else written here. That sounds fantastic to me.
Bragging about being aware of status games is another status game.
Buying stuff from Amazon is more like cargo cult than Clubhouse is.
Similarly, "cargo-culting" can be applied to a piece of code or script everyone copies and reuses without actually knowing how it works and then being confused when they've effectively built a wooden airplane and no goods have arrived.
It's very common slang in tech circles.
I don't think there are many people on Clubhouse who are using it to talk to have group audio conversations with their friends and family - that's what WhatsApp and suchlike are for.
Twitter is a bit more about status, but it also has a much stronger focus on niche interests. There are plenty of people I follow on Twitter who have low follower counts but consistently post interesting things about niche topics that I'm interested in.
Did I miss something? What happened to the telephone? Been using that for audio conversations for quite a while and don’t have to be a part of privacy-compromising social media companies.
I agree that this is a thing. I'm not sure its the thing. Clubhouse got a fast start with appearances but the likes of Musk, high interest content like the CEO of Robin Hood's appearing mid-gamestop craziness, etc. That, combined with the invite system meant that people were hearing about clubhouse and it gained reputation as the new exciting thing. Its now struggling to find a persistent place in the world. The former is remarkable, the latter is default.
"Mountains of shite" has never been a real problem for social media. Twitter, blogs, youtube and others all had this claim leveled against them. 99.9% is crap and no one cares. All cats and sandwiches. The absence of 0.1%, bad discovery systems and such have been problems. That said, the "minimum viable" discovery method is twitter.
Anyway... most successful social media thus far has either done it with home grown talent, like youtube, or being Twitter. Twitter requires very little commitment or effort, and is much better than facebook for famous people. Youtube eventually got youtubers... Twitch, Tiktok. IG is somewhere in between, with a lot of celebrity action but also IG-grown celebrities.
CEOs and celebrities are ok as boosters, but they're not going to be there daily. The equivalent of a youtuber will have to emerge for clubhouse for it to stick. Cargo cult...eh. stretch.
And yes. Ego, self promotion, a desire to be front and centre like Elon will play a big role. That goes without saying.
These apps can be a good supplement to likes of HAM radio for non-technical people but who knows what will become as things continue to ramp back up to being normal again for physical interactions.
I sure hope not. That clout chasing crap leads to the worst and most boring conversations.
People still unironically believe shit like this, that your choice of phone OS says what kind of status you have??
Edit: typo
Maybe they should exit to Epic Games and rebrand to ClubHouseParty.
EDIT: So these logos are not similar no? Clubhouse [0] vs Houseparty? [1]
I guarantee (and I think Houseparty is watching them) that if Clubhouse decides to do video, Houseparty will file a lawsuit against them.
Talk about something and evangelize it, you're participating in a pyramid scheme or maybe your persona makes you a natural salesperson and shill for whatever the cause. Crypto(currency), OTOH, is something that through network effect and social media echo chambers has come to fruition - for better or for worse.
Let the market discover itself has been my mantra for 9 years, going back to G+ early days is when I promoted, shared, and prophesized about crypto. I came to the realization that any information shared runs against my personal goals to capitalize on markets.
The first time I mined crypto in 2011 I documented all the steps on my blog for Ubuntu 8 with all the AMD and opencl goodies. Eventually I 410'd the whole blog and decided "don't talk about it"
Another almost billionaire who doesn't tweet or join social audio apps. But I do read the commentary and according to sentiment, act accordingly.