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I think you hit on a good point re: status, and in that way Clubhouse is very reminiscent of TED (remember when that was an obsession?) - people gathering to hear pre-eminent experts and learn.

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.

As someone trying to bootstrap a podcast, yeah that bar is lower, but there's still a lot of work that simply can't be automated or made better with tooling (things like marketing, logo, etc.) but there's some clear areas where I think it would be possible to innovate, such as using AI to cut out long dead space, 'umms', and other minor vocal glitches that are simple but very tedious to cut out.

The problem with Clubhouse is the product sucks.

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.

>The idea of listening to party-line style conversations isn't totally insane

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

I hadn't thought about it like that. A16Z is behind Substack as well, and they seeded the platform by paying well-known writers six-figure advances to set up Substack exclusive newsletters.

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.

> There was never a reason for high status individuals to be on clubhouse

Sounds like early-stage Quora.

Quora doesn't really depend on status. If some random 17-year-old in Nicaragua who's really into the topic you asked about can provide the answer to your question, that's a good outcome. Clubhouse was not about knowledge transfer in that way. While Quora works like a "ask a librarian" hotline, Clubhouse was more like Comic-Con, where the identity of the speaker is the most important thing.

Early Quora was remarkable by how many high profile people were answering. That was a big part of its early appeal.

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...

Except that doesn’t happen on Quora. So what happens on Quora?

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.

But it could have worked. At some point the hype cycle could have become self-sustaining. What you are calling pump and dump could be seen as starting an internal combustion engine. It's just that Clubhouse sputtered instead of firing up.

Come to think of it, isn't all celebrity news like this? People who are famous because they are famous?

> it was because of the pump and dump style of Andreesen Horrowitz and the silicon valley obsession with being an early adopter.

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...

In Russian segment most of the mentions of Clubhouse were about what (somewhat) famous person was banned in what room.

I can't imagine that spat with a journalist mattered even a little bit one way or the other (and it's not exactly a consensus view that she came out looking better than the CEO, though you clearly think that's the case). Mentioning it here sounds more like personal axe-grinding than anything else.