The New Clubhouse | Hacker News Reader

The New Clubhouse

blog.clubhouse.com

23 pointssatvikpendem39 comments

The copy on this page is just choking on itself.

> To picture a Chat, imagine if your group texts and your Instagram Stories met at the park, talked for hours, became best friends and fell in love. 9 months later, they gave birth to a new way of keeping in touch – one that lets you hear your friends’ voices, meet their friends, and spend less time typing. If “social messaging” were a thing, that’s what it would be.

Wow.

Did they actually use “getting pregnant on the first date” as what they want to emulate?

It seems like that, but I don’t know the gestation period for social media sites. Is it nine months?

I don't interpret "met at the park, talked for hours, became best friends and fell in love" as all taking place on the first date?

It seems they've pivoted to something few people on HN are likely to use. Does anyone here use instagram stories? So maybe this appeals to their target demographic?

> Does anyone here use instagram stories?

This is the most common social media for people under 40 in the US, very self evident if you have a social group of all ages and have used all major apps.

I don't use stories but I often use their Reels feature. There are some great shorts there, it really reminds me of the Vine days.

You should try tiktok. It's great.

I've tried it, the algorithm doesn't really work for my interests for some reason. Reels nails it though.

If I’m reading that right they basically made google wave on mobile. Not the worst idea if executed right

I can read and catch up on many group text messages very quickly but having to go through dozens of voice messages sounds much more time consuming, even if you can choose faster speeds.

Plus, unless you're a superb on the spot thinker or on a rip that day, it can be hard to express longer thoughts in one shot and having to rerecord is also not appealing. With text, you can edit it easily.

Just noting that only girls are sending messages in this app, judging by the frontpage.

I assume this is done quite deliberately and it's easy to imagine how marketing ends up here. Greg and a few more guys are still there on the receiving end, no need to complain about being unrepresented.

(using "girls"/"guys" because that's definitely what they're going for)

Finally! It’s been days if not weeks since the last social app was released. People suffer every day from having too unified friend graphs, and this brings some well needed fragmentation in the app silos we all love. I can’t wait to build another incomplete social graph of a slightly different demographic.

It’s also incredibly refreshing to see marketing for “personal chats with friends” combined with not a single mention of outdated fads like “privacy” and “encryption”. This leaves the door open for data collection of intimate relationships – an underrepresented data source in todays ad targeting frameworks.

I can't help but feel like social media companies are desperately trying to "innovate" but long ago ran into the limits of the medium.

You have a device which can play sound and display text, images and videos. There's only so many ways you can shuffle those things around.

...and yet I have a feeling nikita bier will continue to press "shuffle" and make himself a few more dozen million dollars a few more times.

Partly kidding but partly serious hehe.

Indeed, it's quite impressive that he could build and sell the same app twice. Maybe he'll do it a few more times before people catch on.

I had to deal with issues with the Saturn app for teenagers at work, and then I learned he had done some consulting for them. Dude's got the magic touch!

Smart design decisions make a lot of difference. TikTok didn't have any new technology, but absolutely wiped the floor with Instagram and YouTube.

If anyone from Clubhouse is reading this, or any entrepreneurs in this space, it's soooo hard managing whether or not I can get my friends into a new platform if some or all have conceptions that they would need an invite in order to use the app.

A good domain name and nothing more!

And 110M funding but your point stands, no talent.

They forced Clubhouse (clubhouse.io) to rebrand to Shortcut, too.

Never forget how much a16z cheerleaded them and financed this whole fiasco

Clubhouse always had the same stench of hype about it as crypto did.

What they had was a feature, not a company. Now they're offering a feature, which everybody else seems to have already. Again, it's just a nice brand with a premium domain name, but no essence.

"We didn’t build Clubhouse because it was a smart thing to do. Social products rarely work"

Wow, they're already prepping their "our incredible journey" blog post next.

"We did it because we love this product"

That's why you're pivoting into a new one?

As an Android user, I am already laughing out loud at just 1 sentence in on that page.

I've been a Clubhouse addict for quite a long time now (not proud of it; mostly waste of time). The update is absolute garbage and shows the product has failed and this is just hoping for a Hail Mary pivoting while balance of VC money is positive. The original product has structural issues that prevent scale so I'm not surprised but at least it was original and somewhat unique. This is just useless and subsumed by proper chat apps.

Well, they have to justify their billion dollar valuation somehow, but it's seeming that their valuation and Clubhouse itself was just a Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon.

Hopefully this heralds the end of shitty businesses getting pumped full of cheap money. We've been living in a fantasy universe for the last ten years.

The problem I had with clubhouse is that I felt the hallway was too much of a walled garden. I just saw whatever it wanted me to see and not a collection of everything that existed that was searchable. I'm not sure this is the update I'm looking for, but honestly, I haven't used it in a long long time.

This is the kind of pivot you have to do when you raised a hundred million at a four billion evaluation and what you've built is basically Skype for influencers. Thank God the Fed raised the interest rates

Ya they're hoping to strike lightning twice. If it doesn't they're folding soon, as there's no incentive for any employee when the next raise at $300m valuation means that investors own the whole company as the common shares get wiped out.

Voice-only group chat?

All the kids I know are into visual social media.

A video-only group chat might be interesting. Voice-only sounds hard to browse, skim or market.

is Clubhouse better than X/Twitter Spaces, if yes, by how much is it better?

Does it have anything to replace my Spaces use?

It was better when all the cool people were there and none of the uncool. Now it’s just uncool people everywhere again

Clubhouse was never cool.

No. Spaces ate its early lunch.

Clubhouse had a moment, then was overrun by cryptobros and sketchy rooms, and then Spaces waltzed in and with it's larger graph in place already, ate it. The market for annoying voice chat rooms wasn't that large to begin with and once the hype died down (oh, not forgetting Clubhouse's large delay on Android app, which was a bit too long and lost a ton of users), it was a shell of itself and no one talks about it / or on it, anymore.

They're trying to pivot/expand into something else, because what else can they do, but it's a whatever meh now.

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