Ask HN: Do you still use Clubhouse app?
I stopped using it 5-6 months back as most rooms I find were pretty boring or just people arguing about random stuff.
If you still use it, what are some interesting rooms you follow?
There are only so many incredible Harvard professors you can randomly meet at night to listen in on them having the most incredible discussion about life and the future.
The moment I took a look (which was pretty early) it was already nothing but scams and spam. And celebrities of varying popularity selling stuff to their audiences.
The google stats for "clubhouse" paint a picture: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=clubhouse
I feel the same about TED
Have I just been doing it wrong? are there any decent presentations out there?
The only kind of presentations I like are the ones at hacker conferences. They tend to be for a highly technical audience and very non-commercial. Just about the tech, not trying to sell anything.
You can find recordings on https://media.ccc.de for example. They have a lot of German content but most of the event presentations are in English.
Although most conferences are about as shallow as TED talks. TED's been portrayed to me as some kind of a revelation, that's why I'm asking. Maybe they just got worse with time, like almost anything tends to do.
They spread because they make you feel smart. Books don’t make you feel smart as quickly or as easily. People are very bad at estimating how much they learn from a particular source… instead, when you ask someone “How much did you learn from watching a TED talk?” They answer the question as if you had asked, “How good did you feel watching a TED talk?”
The same problem pervades research into teaching. You can’t use student surveys to evaluate teacher performance.
Are you sure you are thinking about TED talks (or perhaps they've changed the format)? Because the selling point of TED talks (not TEDx Talks, which is something different) is that they are 10-12 minutes and to the point. And no matter what you might think of the subject most of them are great masterclasses of clear and precis presentation techniques. You can learn a lot about public speaking and presentation from them.
All that being said TED has gone massively downhill over past few years. When they first started TED really did manage to get some of the biggest names in their fields to give really unique talks. However as they've massively expanded the number of shows they do they've become less and less picky as to who they let on stage. This has led to their 'brand' declining and fewer and fewer prestigious people want to be associated with TED.
any decent book written by an actual scientist will serve you much better.
The whole point of TED talks was never to replace that book. Rather to get you excited enough to pick up that book, especially in a subject you initially had no interest in. In fact most scientists with books use TED as a platform to convince you to read that book.
If a sentence is expressed incorrectly the speaker will repeat it again and again until it's perfect. It makes for a high quality video, but the live audience has to suffer through it.
Back in 2012 I watched my first TED video about a guy teaching how to use a paper towel. I didn't realize that was TEDx and not TED, so I avoided all TED videos for several years, and surely missed worthwhile content.
Also worth learning English for
I have my internet stranger group of friends who are always around for chat. But also love listening to music rooms when I want to discover new stuff.
Essentially I use it for radio as a socially deprived remote worker.
I also created a bot that can talk and speak in rooms that leverages GPT-3 for a bit of fun -> https://lordajax.com/post/Omega-Clubhouse-GPT-3-bot/
There are Figma and live Javascript coding rooms, where everyone gets on and has open access to the same playgrounds. Get's chaotic but generally everyone self organizes.
Nothing really compares to Agora/Clubhouse audio quality.
Footnote: I am a "socialite" and love to talk to new people often.
==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ====
Made a Clubhouse room -> https://www.clubhouse.com/room/MwrYA8YQ
Edit: Sitting in an empty room for 40 minutes now... proves the thread I suppose aha - will wait patiently
Edit 2: Got 1 person so far
Name a vegetable when you come up so I can kick non HN people.
==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ====
meant i could not willingly be a part of this but that's just me. instagram/snapchat folks seem to be liking it but not for some time as i have heard. the "euphoria" has kinda died as i had asked a few people who used to clock 14+hours in a single sitting.
About the topic, glad that Clubhouse hype is over. There are niche communities around the world who are still actively using it.
Also people who don't use Discord or other gaming apps are using it for live game chatting.
When in fact they just weren't able to use Agora's SDK for Android properly. The weirdest thing is that they made it mobile app exclusive, for something which really does not need to be phone exclusive to begin with.
They were both iOS developers as far as I remember and a lot of the code they already had from a few other social networks they'd tried.
I hosted a room once, which I was really nervous about - I never really felt like I could participate in most of the rooms I was listening in on - there weren't many ins, and joining a voice-call is much harder than posting a message. I wonder if that barrier wasn't a big factor.
Its not the big rooms. Its the small rooms. There are not constantly available. You just need to find (active) clubs that are right for you and need to follow their content.
With the (not so) new feature of reply, some of those content is available like a podcast. But, of course that is missing the point of participation.
1. A core group of speakers got addicted to it, tended to dominate many of the rooms, and appeared to know each other. So it got a bit samey and boring with them moderating everything.
2. A quantity vs quality dynamic seemed to appear in order to grow following counts and club sizes, which led to non stop lowest common denominator chats. I just went on now and this is clearly still a problem.. "Big Income Opportunities for You in 2022", "Real Relationship Talk", "Networking eLounge".. these sound like email spam subject lines. For me, these topics suck for the same reason on Clubhouse that they would if they were Ask HN topics..
There's probably more to it than that, and I might be being unfair, but those are just my initial gut answers.
That was what I was hoping when I first tried it.
Or something like "Indie Hackers talking to each other".
Or "Digital Nomad audio meetups".
But I never found interesting channels.
Any suggestions?
Here's my Show HN for it, didn't get much attention - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29486307
But IRC on Libera comes pretty close.
It really depends on who was in the room, and the ability of the people on stage to stimulate interesting conversation.
It also felt somewhat formal, I felt uncomfortable seeing myself as a listener in a square. It was ambiguous whether I was a passive listener or I had the possibility to be active. I have a thick accent so I prefer to communicate by chat.
I thought Clubhouse was interesting, just because of how it speed-ran the Quora descent from high-quality, VIP-seeded experience, to absolute Yahoo Answers depravity once it opened up and the unwashed masses poured in.
At the time Clubhouse was being hyped in Twitter, a startup hired me as a growth engineer (read, social media manager). I went through tons of twitter threads of viral growth case studies. Everyone was so preachy about Clubhouse and Hey.com. They sold the idea that those were the greatest things ever to hit the startup space. The "invite only business with viral fame on twitter" felt like the only way to a sell startup in the 2020-21 era.
Writing this comment now, I feel nothing but hate and bitterness for Twitter's hypocrisy in the dev/hacker circle there. Discovering a good idea or content worth value from twitter is like finding a needle in a bunch of needles.