Ask HN: What happened to Clubhouse? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What happened to Clubhouse?

155 pointsshamoo158 comments

I've not been following its development. I do not hear about anymore. I guess the hype has died out. Is it still popular? Is it still gaining users? What went wrong? Have more viable competitors risen?

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The most wild thing, to me, is how effectively it has been taken over by scam artists. The other day I tuned into a 'startup pitch' show where the premise is you pitch your company idea to an 'investor'. Unfortunately in practice the investor applauds your idea, and then claims he will 'invest' engineering time worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, but he needs you to 'prove you are serious' by investing tens of thousands of dollars of your own money.

I'm sure after putting up the cash you are handed some janky app worth nothing close to what you paid, much less his supposed investment. While maybe not being illegal, it was incredibly predatory. The 'entrepreneurs' weren't being asked the most basic questions about their business, and were clearly not financially in a place to invest the money he was demanding. Rather than helping them achieve an entrepreneurial dream, he is sucking up the limited money they have (perhaps even inviting them to take on debt) without any real hope of success.

It seems like every channel on Clubhouse is some version of exploitation, whether it's about crypto, your love life, or your money. I don't know how I would moderate that away if I was them, but it seems like the time to do it was several months ago, and now might be too late.

I remember entering a channel once that was just a bunch of “Queens” with hot avatars sitting at the top, and the host who was some dude with a smooth big black guy voice would talk with the audience and ask people “which of these queens would you like to sponsor?” and people would donate money to them or whatever. And the queens would also talk a bit if they felt like it. God it was stupid, one of the last channels I checked out before dropping this app completely.

This is how I remember most of the Clubhouse content during the initial popularity.

There were exceptions such as famous VCs, authors, and tech people doing Q&A, but everything else felt like content marketers, online course sellers, and crypto scammers having a field day with their sudden access to a lot of bored and curious people.

Outside of a few pre-scheduled and planned Clubhouse events, I never actually found anything organically interesting on the platform.

Don’t forget all the “Life Coaches”

My life coach works at Chilli's, I can go see them any time between 3 and 7 on weekdays. I can put in a word if anybody wants to respond below. Blue Cross is showing some resistance, but I think they'll come around.

Update: I spoke with Tyler, he says our new meeting place is TGI Fridays but that you're all welcome. He asks that groups of 8 or more call ahead.

Because I didn't clearly remember the character's name in Fight Club, this made me initially think of kind of a superposition of Brad Pitt as Tyler in Fight Club and as Chad the personal trainer in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_After_Reading.

"Pitt...said when he was shown the script, he told the Coens he did not know how to play the part because the character was such an idiot: "There was a pause, and then Joel goes...'You'll be fine'."

so basically the internet

No, the traditional internet required that you be literate, be able to write, have an IQ > 45.

Already we saw sites like Medium attract lower quality content than blogs that require a certain amount of intelligence to set up.

Audio and video communication online is something Marshall McLuhan warned you about: take a look at TikTok if you don't believe me.

Lol you're so full of yourself.

> the traditional internet required that you be literate, be able to write, have an IQ > 45.

No it didn't. The internet required you to know how to setup a server and hosting. If you knew how, you could serve the most illiterate, badly thought out crap ever, and nobody would stop you.

You think that you needed to be litterate, because you've confirmation-biased yourself into thinking that you were 'special'/'gifted' for having read some nginx-manuals and setup your own blog. And now that everybody has access to the thing that made you feel 'special' you act childish and try to degrade that achievement of others.

"yeah you write for your own blog, but did you use MEDIUM while doing it? What a poser! If you're a real writer, like ME, you'd host your own blog in the 90s".

> Already we saw sites like Medium attract lower quality content than blogs that require a certain amount of intelligence to set up.

Who made you the arbiter of quality content? Did you ever self-reflect and realize that it might not be about quality, but rather your personal preference?

Are you too stupid to see that people might not share your views at all? That what they think is quality-content you might think is shit? And that what you think is quality-content others might think is shit?

Lol.

1. Back in the 90’s it was Apache, not NGINX. 2. Cool kids today make a blog w/ Jamstack and don’t mess w/ NGINX. 3. People who blog on medium seem to be more hung up on getting a domain name than anything else (either $10 a year is not worth it or paying $10 a year means you’ve been ‘canceled’ by big tech or something…)

The ignorance of those people is not so much technical but in the domain of marketing and branding. Like ‘data scientists’ who think they are too good to run unit tests or type ‘git commit’ they think being high status is letting other people do things for you, so in their bizzaro world being on medium makes you look like a somebody and having your own domain makes you a nerd, a tool or something like that.

Thank God people who won’t register a domain name won’t figure out how to make a crypto wallet so they’ll always be looking from the outside in, wishing they had a bored ape of their own.

clubhouse is full of VCs and angels. wannabe celebrities.

Somebody got sick of saying “if I had a nickle for every time somebody had some great idea for an app” and decided to go out there and get the nickle.

There's a company that does something very similar a few floors up in our office building. The website is atrocious,the 'tech' is so absurd that it could win absurd of a month award. Yet, the most expensive cars, with the company logo, some shady links with Russia and etc. It's a joke. I feel bad for people who fall for it.

My hypothesis is that a lot of the early hype was down to people who liked the idea of being part of an exclusive club but didn't really like when everyone else was also part of the club.

Then twitter launched "Spaces", meaning people could have a similar experience to clubhouse without building yet another social network.

This is absolutely correct. They build a nice map of everyone’s contacts and that was the value.

I don’t think its just exclusivity, in the sense that “I’m one of the cool kids”. If the Clubhouse concept was based on conversations amongst a peer group then you need some exclusivity, just to have a manage the number of people in the conversation. Once anyone could join and you had more then maybe 10 people and the conversation aspect become too hard to manage and everything just basically became a podcast.

The Twitter Spaces move reminds me of the Instagram Stories move. As in life, upstarts with killer new features sometimes manage to take only a temporary hold and are easy to rip off if they don't manage to protect what they've got.

Did Twitter Spaces actually take off? My only experience of it was super early on when a celebrity I really likes joined a Twitter space to promote her new project but in an effort to record the conversation, I discovered that the iPad was not supported at the time. :/

Since then I have not heard a peep about Twitter Spaces.

I’m always intrigued when I see someone make such a bold prediction. What did you base it on?

Similar to Quora -- the hype was based on the initial exclusivity/SV celebrity factor. Once things opened up, average quality of content went way down.

Right, it's in the name, it worked when it was a club, you would run into celebrities, had a kind of back-stage or afterparty vibe. I came back a few months after quitting (I didn't like how blocking someone became a whole meta-drama since they could no longer speak in rooms you were speaking) -- couldn't find a single room worth hanging around in.

But quora is still around and very useful- maybe even more so than during the hype period

What kind of useful answers can be found on Quora these days?

Mainly articulate opinions on various questions that are open ended. "What regrets do you have?", that kind of thing.

It's actually more useful than that. Even for queries with objective, straightforward answers, if I get a search result with a Wikipedia article and a quora answer I almost always go with quora. The Wikipedia result is an article written by a faceless group of people and there's no way for me to gauge the quality other than included references (which are very hit and miss on a good number of articles). The quora result is a variety of answers from a bunch of people with real names attached (in most cases). I can pick which answer I think feels more authoritative or detailed, or mix and match answers. I think having a real name behind the answer and each answer not just being a mishmash of contributions from anonymous sources results in higher quality answers I can trust (or at least make a decision about what level of trust I want to have in the answer which is very helpful when you're getting answers from the internet). Also having a bunch of answers to compare and contrast instead of just one definitive answer actually helps

Most of the names though are unknown. Unless it is a really famous person, so it is virtually the same thing as wikipedia which actually has proper information compared to Quora.

You are the only person I know about who would choose quora over anything but yahoo answers.

I use it for just about everything. In fact if I could limit my google search answers to just quora, stackoverflow and reddit I would be satisfied.

Quora has much more staying power than Clubhouse, which was a novelty even in its honeymoon period.

Interesting.

    site:quora.com OR site:stackoverflow.com search query

results in mostly one or the other winning on Google. However, they are the only ones who show up in the results.

When you are doing an assignment for school that could be answered in 10 words but the teacher has placed a 500 words lower limit for it

This describes so much of the content on the web nowadays and it’s just exhausting.

I thought I was the weird one with my ultra-succinct communication but I now know the endless walls of text reflect the corrupting effect of needing to please search engines.

That explains a lot of the crap I see. Google something very specific like how to setup a testing library? You'll get an article from dev.to with a 3000 word wall of text containing not only a verbose description of what is unit testing and why you should unit test, but also the author's life story and maybe a recipe for mojitos

The actual content was a couple of shell commands and like 3 lines of JSON

Worse still are those auto generated spam sites that have an FAQ index on the top of the page looking like a Wiki but are actually just empty content pulled in from multiple sources.

Man, where the hell did those come from? All of a sudden in the past few months they are all over my DDG search results.

The sky is blue. Why is the sky blue? Philosophers have wondered for millennia about the hue of the firmament. Some say that…

Luckily we have GPT-3 now...

I would love to use GPT-3 in reverse, to convert search results into the 30 words that actually answer my query.

Just an hour ago, I was looking for beaches in Florida - Quora provided some great answers for me

The core "problem" with live audio is that you are drinking straight from the source of information as it is produced. With Quora, there is a ton of drivel or even spam, but that useless content sits around for a while and gets filtered out by some combination of moderation, voting, and search rankings. In contrast, with Clubhouse, you are instead highly reliant on personalities who are building reputation by having a high signal to noise ratio, which doesn't scale once the whole world is involved.

Additionally, the high-value people on the platform are themselves often there because of the other high-value people. If most of the rooms you go to speak in are just filled with a thousand fans, maybe you'd be better off using that tile to talk to your half a million followers on Twitter or Instagram. The experience of a small private club simply doesn't scale.

> you are instead highly reliant on personalities who are building reputation by having a high signal to noise ratio, which doesn't scale once the whole world is involved.

The major problem with any internet community, even moderated ones. It's just too much text, too many people, and no real conversations occur.

You could even see it decades ago on IRC servers, which solidifies my view that it's a fundamental social limitation not a technology problem. Groups always split from the #general channels into their own smaller cliques because once a server grew large enough, even a moderated #general was impossible to communicate in.

Too many people in one space is just not conducive to conversation and you also no longer get the self-moderation of pseudo social connections. Since there's no real conversations occurring in #general/any busy chat, it's just lots of, there's less need for people to care about what they say in regards to it's implication on others.

The absolute extreme of this phenomenon is a busy twitch chat, which is a sight to behold.

I've found Quora to be just full of spam these days. They don't take the problem seriously at all. And they keep trying terrible and spammy incentivization tactics to keep people engaged.

Yeah, I noticed the SEO folks are now trying to game it, making the content even more useless. Self promotion is a huge issue with Quora.

I agree that Quora is still around.

I find Reddit to be much more useful these days when searching for answers.

somehow Quora is still around though - how?

It's big in India

A fairly large percent of my google searches contain answers from Quora on page 1. They’re playing the SEO game well.

And from that comes traffic, which I’m guessing they must be monetizing.

It’s the new “Yahoo Answers”

Yes, something is off with Google's ranking of Quora pages. On many topics reddit have more relevant content but Quora turns up higher on search results.

I dislike it when the top result of my search is Quora. My knee-jerk reaction is to add '-quora' to the search term.

On the rare occasion that I click on a Quora link, I am immediately harassed by a nagging registration popup, further fuelling my hatred of Quora and immediately pressing back and appending 'reddit' to my search term.

Just like the Internet. When getting online at all was an IQ test the discourse was stellar. Sadly September came and never went.

The blind community is still there, maybe not as strong as it was, but we still use it a lot. I guess the audio-only nature of it, in the age of picture-based apps like Instagram, really made a difference.

While I appreciate that it helps the blind community, the deaf community was really left out. I personally saw at least one complaint about this in a group that I'm in.

An interesting note on this is that Twitter are rolling out Speech to Text for their Spaces.

I'm sorry if this is a bit insensitive, but if we're talking about a sound conversation based platform, isn't it a bit absurd for deaf communities to be upset?

No, it's not absurd to complain about stuff being moved to places you can't participate in.

It's the same situation with everything being a video now. I do better with diagrams and text, but now I have to sit through someone jabbering for 9 minutes for 1 minute of content to please the algorithm. And as someone who wants to make how-tos, getting any traffic to text these days is nearly impossible.

Oh I’m with you on that one. It’s like the lazy less effective formats are cannibalizing all the others.

Huh? What serious subject has only video tutorials and no text/diagrams? I also don't understand your argument about traffic to text at all, we're on a high-traffic mostly-text site right now with plenty of how-to style content.

>> "Huh?"

I know, right

>> "What serious subject has only video tutorials and no text/diagrams?"

This sets us up to be at odds because now I feel like I have to mind-read what you consider serious to not have you dismiss any example I offer. Do you consider Minecraft serious? It's Ground Zero for this kind of thing.

>> "I also don't understand your argument about traffic to text at all, we're on a high-traffic mostly-text site right now with plenty of how-to style content."

"nearly"

Have you ever looked at the new link page? Few things get traction. And HN's patience with self-promotion would falter fast if I linked off to a Patreon/Ko-fi/whatever any time I gave good advice. I've only ever had one person wander in through the link in my profile and support my Patreon. I appreciate people who can afford to spend their time going deep here while developing the skills and having the experiences that backstop that advice, but most people are far from that rarified position. I can't do the kind of zero-BS how-to stuff I want to do, get traction in the modern media environment (meaning audio and/or video), and not get some kind of compensation for it.

No, Minecraft is obviously not a serious subject, it's a videogame. But even so, there are tons of books with minecraft tutorials out there, and a quick search shows this page [0] with tons of text/diagram tutorials. The fact that you struggle to get paid has nothing to do with the state of tutorials on the web. Other people are making plenty of money selling minecraft books to kids.

[0] https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Tutorials

Who said anything about making Minecraft tutorials? It was an example with a comment you skipped over.

You aren't being serious. Shoo.

Well, what I mean is that it’s kinda like being upset that people are going to concerts or listening to radio.

Except conversations don’t have to be audio only. Take our exchange right here.

there absolutely is a quality to audio-based conversation that is lost when moving it to other mediums, but I agree with your sentiment and I sympathize. The speed at which words are said, inflections, tone changes, the general energy behind the voice. For example, do they sound exceptionally happy, or depressed, or sarcastic?

There are a lot of thing's an author would need to be deliberate about communicating in order to relay the same message and context as an audio message. In other words, I would not say an audio-only conversation can be said to be movable to any other medium successfully.

I wish there were better tools for converting audio into other formats you can digest and still obtain all the nuance. It takes a certain kind of energy to communicate verbally, and I can assure you that most people would rather type than speak if the nuances of speech arent relevant to the conversation they are trying to have. ("most" of the newer generations, at least)

In the US there are actually legal requirements now for certain types of communication software (including video games!) to offer text-to-speech/speech-to-text or equivalent accessibility technology to address this sort of problem if they include voice chat. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/video-game-communication-no...

I have a friend I knew from work who is severely hard of hearing (and we were actually a business phone company). I invited him to Clubhouse and asked him to try Twitter Spaces. We haven't seen captioning work on Clubhouse whereas it's available to all users on Twitter Spaces.

Also, isolated to me or a tiny subset of users - the only way to sign in is with a OTP sent via SMS. The delivery is very spotty for my carrier for some unknown reason (other services can deliver fine). So like right now, I can't log in and have to wait until they quietly restore delivery.

It's unfortunate because the stability of the Clubhouse app is far better than Twitter Spaces. A group I'm with has spent promoting events and it's embarrassing and annoying to have the Twitter Space unexpectedly end for everyone if the app of the "host" crashes.

The reason Clubhouse didn't have staying power is that there its value proposition is hypocritical, and therefore doesn't work: On Clubhouse, it only matters who's talking (for example, Elon). It doesn't matter who's listening. The more important the speaker is, the more it is a one-to-many broadcasting platform, and the less it matters if it's live. That makes it as useful as podcasts, which is already a saturated space.

Even if I take your first statement to be true, I'm not sure the rest of the comment follows. If we look over at video content livestreaming is popular (and increasingly so). Why have companies like Twitch been successful enough to be bought by Amazon rather than losing to YouTube or similar? Is there something special about audio that video doesn't have?

Yeah, audio is better suited for hands-free interaction, pseudo-anon interactions (which might be helpful for strangers talking to each other), much lower bandwidth requirements, etc. The ergonomics of audio is better, as there is no need to stay in frame. It also focuses the conversation more around what is being said rather than being distracted by someone's environment.

Twitch is Amazon's hedge against Youtube, I won't say it was "successful" pre-acquisition.

The worst part of all this is that clubhouse.io changed their name to some stupid thing that doesn't make any sense and they didn't need to. They could have just waited out the hype.

I agree. The new name never stuck for me and I keep having to google what it changed to (Shortcut, FYI) so that I can find the bookmark to it.

Right from the beginning Clubhouse felt like it was trying to Make Fetch Happen. There was the company itself - loudly shouting about how it was the future, their VC backers loudly shouting about how it was the future, and then a bunch of SV bros whose entire brands are caught up in being seen to be early adopters. So they all jump on it because they want to be seen to be early adopters, and scream about how they were in on the ground floor of The Next Big Thing. But the truth is that there was never any value proposition to it, all of the value the company was trying to claim in the early days was purely down to the celebrity guests who were never going to stay because they had no reason to let their value accrue to clubhouse.

The distinguishing feature of clubhouse wasn't live audio chats, it was Silicon Valley VCs hyping up a valueless app for completely self-interested reason.

There is also this really weird strain of investors in SV who have noticed that journalists have started covering some of the problems in by silicon valley and decided that they - billionaire business owners - are a persecuted minority who must be protected from these evil reporters. And you see from these guys a continual effort to try and replace online media with something they can control.

This thread captured it https://twitter.com/ShaanVP/status/1371972261004070913

That’s a really good summary / prediction.

My favorite line:

> You vow to only work on enterprise saas for the rest of your career

I thought it was interesting to think about what Clubhouse was displacing. It felt the most analogous to radio. So, what could you do if you had radio at internet scale? Or what would it take to make internet scale radio successful?

In my mind, it came down to how challenging it would be to produce and monetize content. It's non trivial work. Producing a good radio show that's worth listening to takes a lot of time and effort. Podcasts are a good example here. I think there's data out there that suggests most podcasts don't have more than 1 episode or survive the first year. Without a good way to monetize, it's not worth the effort.

So while easy in the short term for celebrities/influencers/celebrities/VCs to jump on the bandwagon, the effort wouldn't be sustainable or worth it to them in the long run, and then you have a content problem again.

I also experienced some dark onboarding patterns while I checked it out that make me suspect their growth numbers were a bit over inflated, in an ask for forgiveness later kind of situation.

We've had Internet radio for almost 2 decades; it's called "podcasts". It's literally eaten "real" radio; NPR probably has more podcasts than broadcasts now.

That seems to support christopherslee's point. NPR already had what it needed institutionally to do podcasts people wanted to listen to and the reach to make sure they have a chance to reach an audience. I could start one and probably do okay because I already know a bit about audio engineering and marketing and can make my own music, but most people start from 0.

I thought they could be an add on to podcasts or radio shows where instead of having a phone bank or twitter feed, people listen in on clubhouse and then when picked by the host they get to talk or win tickets or whatnot.

Clubhouse filled in for going out and talking to people.

I don’t think their decline is any great mystery. Concern about the pandemic declined, people started going out again, and stopped listening in on audio chats on the Internet.

Twitter Spaces is not doing great either, but it doesn’t really matter because it’s just a feature, not a whole business.

If you could go out and talk to celebrities, sure. Or hear off the cuff celebrities from different worlds mix.

That’s what made it so exciting in the beginning… making it feel like you were part of an exclusive club even if you weren’t a famous person. Eventually the hype fades because the bar lowers, and the most interesting people move on.

Your point about Covid is also fair… the timing was good.

I downloaded the app on my iPad, because someone told me it was the new hotness.

As soon as I started it, it was fixed to an iPhone window.

This was about a year ago. No apps should ever do that. It means the app is crap quality.

I nuked it, and forgot about it.

There are plenty of good reasons to dislike Clubhouse, but the lack of an iPad UI on day one is not one of them. When you're building something new, you have to prioritize, and insisting on polish like this just helps to entrench the big players.

That’s not what I’m talking about. It’s easy to write an iOS app that can adapt to an iPad. If it doesn’t, then that means that some kind of outdated hybrid system was used, or they hired the absolute cheapest coders they could find, that used fearfully primitive techniques (or both).

I’ve been writing iOS apps for many years, and have never written one that doesn’t immediately adapt to an iPad. Even my cruddiest, written-in-two-hours test harnesses run on iPads without that ghastly “2X” button. Heck, my very first ObjC “hello world” app adapted to iPads. It’s pretty much built into the SDK.

TBH, I’m not even sure how to get the 2X to appear.

But it’s not my app, or my money. I just didn’t want to waste my time on a bad app. I doubt that I’m the reason they face-planted.

If you don't check the box that says you support the iPad when building your app, then it will run on the iPad at iPhone resolution, with the option to scale up 2x to fill the screen.

Why on Earth would anyone do that?

If I want the app to only run on iPhone, then I’d sniff for it on startup, and present an alert (or, more likely, in my case, a screen), saying “iPhone only.” I own a couple of apps that do exactly that (not ones I wrote). There may be a way to provision the app, so it is not even made available on the App Store, for iPads. I don’t know. I’ve never done that. I think I have a couple of phone apps that have never even been made available for my iPads.

But an app like Clubhouse should run fine on iPad. I can’t think of any technical reason it shouldn’t run on iPad.

I have had dealings with extremely low-cost outsourcing shops, though, and they have a nasty habit of giving us exactly what we asked for; nothing more, nothing less. If the spec said “iPhone Only,” then I could see them turning that checkbox off, as it’s cheaper than writing a sniffer.

If someone does a bad job in one place (especially a highly visible place), then I generally assume that I am seeing the tip of the iceberg, and that they do a bad job, everywhere else. It’s been a fairly good assumption, in my experience.

I just feel that a “major buzz” app, like Clubhouse, should not present that iPhone resolution screen. It’s a perfect example of a brand-wrecking footgun.

I think Instagram does this to this very day? Your video is something not shared by all.

I'm not sure that I'd hold up Instagram as an exemplar of good iOS apps. I've chatted with folks that worked on it.

Isn't it one of the most downloaded apps? Some would say that makes it a good app. I guess your definition can vary but my point is that your criteria clearly does not matter to a large number of users.

> Some would say that makes it a good app.

It’s hard to argue with “It makes money!”.

As long as people are willing to pay for junk, then there will always be a firehose of junk.

It’s still junk, though; even if it wins.

Almost every project I write is filled with compromise; especially as it nears release, and I always have a powerful urge to rewrite it from scratch, but I don’t feel shame. It’s not junk. It represents a sincere effort to do great work.

That’s one reason that I’m so glad to be out of the rat race, and doing my own thing. I feel dirty, if I am knowingly writing junk. My work is a craft, and a labor of love. I get great personal satisfaction from it. Making money, and “beating the competition,” aren’t even minor factors.

You can’t shovel shit, without getting it on you.

Do people still remember Bird? Same thing happening to Clubhouse. These startups were massively hyped up by VCs, but can’t stand the test of time. I suspect a Web3 startup will be the next thing VCs will hype up.

> I suspect a Web3 startup will be the next thing VCs will hype up.

You mean, the whole NFT hype? Just happened. What's next? I'm betting on some VR/AR/XR thing (like pokemon Go, but different, same-same, but different).

So, Gowalla?

You mean that iPhone advertisement?

Pandemic ⤵ Clubhouse ⤵ NFT ⤵

I call it the #Clubhouse Correlation.

That makes the most sense.

"Growth and engagement" doesn't pay the bills in a world already saturated with advertising.

Clubhouse renamed to shortcut, but is otherwise still cruising. clubhouse.io now redirects to shortcut.com. Otherwise still runnin' fine.

I thought clubhouse was a social media site now it's apparently:

> Project management has never been easier

> We bring the flow to your software team's workflow. Plan, collaborate, build, and measure success with Shortcut.

It's two different companies, which I guess was part of the motivation for clubhouse.io to change name to shortcut, since clubhouse.com became massively popular in a very short time

Heh yeah apparently there's more than one Clubhouse. I've never heard of any other besides the Jira competitor, and the OP just said "Clubhouse," not "Clubhouse social media" or anything like that. But I've been downvoted into oblivion, so I guess people think I'm trolling or something

Imagine my confusion when I started a new job and was told we use clubhouse for issue tracking - I had only heard about the social media app

Silly that you're getting downvoted - especially when no one is posting any reasons for their downvote

I mean clubhouse.com is their actual address

That's a terrible name change lol. Might as well have been "social" or "desktop".

It was a cutesy novelty that was invite only for iOS only and meant for the "elites" of silicone valley

Well, people love podcasts so it promised to be a more informal podcast platform with user participation and no built in recording. It got hyped by artificial scarcity (the invitation system) and by celebrities dropping in (it's like a dinner party with Elon yay). It was never that good in the first place, just people from the outside feeling the fomo. And then the floodgates open and the scummy parts of society dropped in, mostly fuelled by the ephemeral aspect of the discussions: crypto scams, made up entrepreneurs with no product, hate speech of all shapes and color. It basically turned into 4chan. And then ofcourse the big names abandoned ship.

Does anybody remember the app Yo?

Bro

I loved that app. My screen name was "IAMPOOPING" and I used to "yo" people when... you know ...

The was a new version called GM (unless they updated it to do more) - you guessed it GM!

I actually was a consultant there.

Tell us more

it just popped up again on my feed after many weeks of silence because apparently Russian regulators have forgotten to censor it (no idea about the source - fwiw the articles may have been written by growth-haxxors):

https://www.inputmag.com/culture/russians-ukraine-war-clubho...

https://topwhich.com/the-second-life-of-clubhouse-the-forgot...

It became Shortcut: https://shortcut.com/

Different Clubhouse.

Not the same clubhouse, but is shortcut any good?

Trello too simple.

JIRA too complex.

Shortcut shits right in the sweet spot. Try it. It works well with small 2 man teams, and large 65 man teams.

Truly not sure if that’s a typo.

I assume that the initial hype was mostly paid for and then the payments stopped at some point, so the hype stopped too.

The Clubhouse hype train and its hype-sqaud on board have ran out of steam after been copied to death by everyone else and the discussions there have derailed into a space for spam, scammers and the same VCs like a16z aggressively spamming notifications to everyone.

As predicted in [0] of its questionable valuation and the competitors surrounding and copying it makes you wonder if they will be still around in a few years time.

> What went wrong?

Late release of Android app. (It was iOS only) and was invite-only for longer than a year and even after competitors copied them. And yes. As all predicted here [1]. So this outcome was really unsurprising and expected.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883362

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26044382

It has died, they just don’t know it yet.

The network has now been poached to death by the typical influencer expert user looking to build a brand or grow some kind of following.

This happens to all new social networks now because new and novel marketing channels give the best ROI, and influencers want to suck these dry before users become harder to influence.

A marketer friend recommended this guy, and I decided to give his book a read. The guy is Gary Vaynerchuk and the book is "Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence-and How You Can, Too".

It's been some time, but I can vividly remember his advice on exploring new social networks in order to generate ROI on new marketing channels. Basically what you are saying but with a lot of inferred 'bro' in the process.

Most high-quality speakers left the platform in 2021. The app has mostly degenerated into cliques. Rewarding the most click-bait titles, revenge rooms and acerbic personalities. There was no plan on sustaining growth or quality and it shows. I think by Feb 2022 the traffic was down 50% from it's 2021 height.

Clubhouse was popular because influential people were on it, behind a wall. This meant if you were an early adopter, you had social capital.

The moment Clubhouse opened its doors to the gen pop, it was doomed.

upvoting everyone referring to the project management app here, lol.

They failed to bring in consistent good speakers.

The good stuff (i.e. An Atlantic writer, former ambassador, dude from think-tank) audience is too niche.

Discovery problem: you never know when good stuff is on.

Crap problem: so much hustle/culture BS.

They now have 'pre-recorded' sessions so you can listen in, which is very helpful.

But still a giant discovery problem.

I really enjoyed some content, but it's hard to find.

And big content makers want to get their stuff replayed, so the 'live' aspect is minimal.

I'm not sure if this model can work in the end.

From my point of view they remained too locked down after Twitter launched their version

The exclusive access model is a double edged sword apparently

Nothing happened to it. It still exists, and still has users. The buzz it had a while ago has died down, and several competitors have emerged (like Twitter Spaces). I imagine it still has a boat load of VC money in the bank, so whether it can figure out a successful business model or not remains to be seen.

Clubhouse was a feature, not a product. It was completed displaced within days of the twitter spaces launch.

This came up on one of the networks I'm in, disclaimer I've never used it, but fyi here's a couple of articles that were referenced in the conversation:

https://onezero.medium.com/what-happened-to-clubhouse-b347fe...

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

The crowd attracted to Clubhouse was mostly also on Twitter, so Twitter Spaces was a natural fit. I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter's purchase of and increasing integration with Revue has a similar impact on Substack for the same reason.

This will probably get me canceled, but some of the most clear racism i've experienced was people from atlanta going off with a whole bunch of anti semitic stuff, I deleted my app that day and dont miss that.

Side question: From a technical perspective, why was it iPhone-only for so long? Even Twitter Spaces still don't work on the web AFAIK despite having announced their intent to do so nearly a year ago.

Rich and famous Americans don't use Android phones, so it added to the apparent exclusivity - I'm sure it's not much more than that, their actual VoIP tech was a SaaS and it's easy to assume that they didn't actually need Android customers at that point.

This isn't meant as a quip or sarcasm, it is actually what a lot of people thought back in its "golden age", reading through Twitter and other social networks. For a lot of people in the US, Android phone == poor, no taste. iPhones are status symbols.

iPhones are status symbols

I can agree with that and it is exactly why I never want one. Cheap Chinaphone, never paying for or subscribing to apps and not giving a shit about optics. That is my special snowflake fashion statement.

We tried it for a while at work, but the data model of nested epics and workflows and issues didn't work very well for our "matrix org" team, and we went back to Jira after a few months.

After the FOMO died, it became unseen as fast as it became visible eight weeks earlier. Wasn't a funny time on my LinkedIn, though, with all the cool kids posing...

If you have a good idea and small business around it, how do you protect your business from big companies?

Because twitter literally took Clubhouse’s business.

It's very hard if your product could be a feature.

"Dropbox is a feature, not a product" - Steve Jobs

I remember Balaji and Naval promoting it so much (one founder is of Indian-origin I think) like it's just gonna break the entire social media industry and whatnot. A breakthrough.

Now they won't even mention it. I hate (and laugh) that they don't take a stand on what they promote. Their tweets so ephemeral. Yesterday it was Clubhouse, today it's bitcoin, tomorrow it's xyz. No spine. Just surviving via capitalism with hit or miss investments.

what is clubhouse?

An audio forward social networking app that sprung up last year.

Isn't that Twitter spaces?

Never heard of Clubhouse.

Twitter Spaces was a direct response to Clubhouse becoming extremely hyped up during the first year of Covid.

Interesting, I didn't know.

I've only ever seen Twitter Spaces not Clubhouse, that's why I asked.

I was an avid user of Clubhouse for a year after joining in January 2021 — I probably spent around 12 hours per day (I know, it’s a lot) on Clubhouse for most of 2021.

I’ve met a handful of people who I now consider good friends (despite not having met them in person yet).

However (and I don’t want to be too critical as I don’t have internal insights or data), they had/have a few glaring issues that ended up pushing away many of the people I met during my time on the app.

* They let mis/disinformation run rampant, particularly regarding (but not limited to) COVID vaccines. I worked with healthcare professionals to combat this misinformation by running room with science based evidence (with none of us getting compensated, of course) but we had no help from anyone at Clubhouse themselves. They seemed happy to allow rooms that most of us believed would lead to deaths to stay open, presumably because they got a lot of engagement at a time when Clubhouse was clearly losing steam.

* When I joined, the variety of rooms was massive. I enjoyed start up rooms, JavaScript rooms, science rooms. But over time, as people left, those rooms disappeared. And the rooms that grew were the ones which the room owners knew would get engagement — general drama. This person fighting with another person. Anti-vaccine misinformation. General topics that didn’t have any substance but would provide entertainment because of the disagreements you heard on stage. Fun for a while, but not a long term plan.

* Clubhouse didn’t incentivise “good” rooms. The rooms I enjoyed had world-leading experts talking about exciting topics. But Clubhouse’s Creator First program didn’t seem interested in those at all. This program was more focused on novel entertainment ideas, and in the end became a bit of a running joke with users because it ultimately did nothing for creators — even the ones who were part of it.

* Of course, a big problem Clubhouse had was beyond its control. As lockdowns eased, people had less time on their own which meant less time on Clubhouse.

In the end, what drove most of my friends away, and what caused me to stop visiting was the notification spam.

So many people I knew turned their notifications off within a week or two of joining because the notifications you’d receive on your phone were relentless. There were minimal controls provided, so your option was either to allow them all or turn them all off. I didn’t mind them because I was enjoying Clubhouse, and after a while I figured out the right setting that allowed me to get notifications that interested me but not the more spammy ones. But that took me a long time, and I’m tech savvy. Many people aren’t and don’t have the patience, so they just turned them all off. Without that daily/hourly reminder, they started to forget about the app.

And I ended up being one of them. At the start of 2022, my perfectly curated notification options started to be ignored and I was suddenly receiving 100+ Clubhouse notifications per day. I thought maybe it was a bug (other people on Twitter had noticed the same — almost like a switch had been flipped), but after a few weeks I was still being bombarded with notifications and I had no other option but to turn them off completely. Then… I stopped using Clubhouse. The people I had enjoyed spending time with were no longer there — driven away by disinterest and drama. My efforts to make the platform better in some small way were ignored. And I no longer had the constant reminder to visit.

I still open the app every day or two to see what’s in the hallway, but not much has changed for the better. I sometimes have private rooms with friends for a quick chat, but even that’s becoming less frequent.

It’s a shame. I don’t remember a social network providing as much entertainment and excitement to me as Clubhouse did around this time last year. But it’s just not the same so I’ve mostly said goodbye.

The guilty-pleasure entertainment from drama makes sense. Though I interpreted it in part a side effect of the ephemeral nature of a room, strongly discouraging recording. A place where it was difficult to be held accountable by being recorded in some form and refuted more formally. A platform that rewards the underdeveloped thoughts in ones head. Maybe that's just social media in general but felt like it was sharper here. I stopped coming before they added the clipping feature.

My favorite example was when there was some comradery in a room about a guy divorcing his wife because she got COVID vaccinated and there was some unfounded ideas about a sexually transmitted thing about the vaccines. It would be interesting if they would allow the audience to have some passive feedback, like thumbs down "I disagree with the stage." Then at least it wouldn't feel like an echo chamber by the loudest while half the audience is just listening curiously in disbelief.

That’s true. The Clips/Replay (Clips being the ability to save a 30-second clip of the room and Replay being the ability to listen back to a whole room after it’s finished, for those who don’t know) was quite a big addition for a social network that seemed to have ephemerality as one of its big selling points. It’s difficult to know how it affected the app as it was added as the app had already started to lose users.

Was the room you mention based on the false information that the COVID vaccine causes you to be HIV+? I remember that was a talking point for a few weeks.

I agree — I really like the emoji responses you can give in a Twitter Space. Clubhouse does at least now have a chatroom for everyone in the room, including the audience, if the creator enables it.

- Covid vaccines and reopening means people can socialize in real life instead.

- Competition (Callin, Twitter Spaces). Callin has unique content. Twitter Spaces has far higher reach and engagement because people already have Twitter on their phone. Notably, Twitter wanted to acquire Clubhouse and Callin's investor wanted to invest in Clubhouse.

- There wasn't much focus on content quality. Large rooms need better moderation tools, etc.

- One of my favorite shows (Good Time) isn't on anymore. That was probably the most popular show, so it's perplexing.

i think twitter spaces.

The hype has passed.

Remember Vero?

it got overrun by woke nonsense and no one wants to listen to that.

They ran out of invites

Oh yeah that happened.

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