[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What Happened to Clubhouse?
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Ask HN: What Happened to Clubhouse?
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?
Author : shamoo
Score : 73 points
Date : 2022-03-27 18:27 UTC (4 hours ago)
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| 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...
| jdrc wrote:
| They ran out of invites
| laurex wrote:
| 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.
| meibo wrote:
| 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.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| It became Shortcut: https://shortcut.com/
| umeshunni wrote:
| Different Clubhouse.
| mosselman wrote:
| Not the same clubhouse, but is shortcut any good?
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| zackbloom wrote:
| 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.
| xwdv wrote:
| 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.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| 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.
| cliftonk wrote:
| Clubhouse was a feature, not a product. It was completed
| displaced within days of the twitter spaces launch.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| "Growth and engagement" doesn't pay the bills in a world already
| saturated with advertising.
| riffic wrote:
| upvoting everyone referring to the project management app here,
| lol.
| colesantiago wrote:
| what is clubhouse?
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| An audio forward social networking app that sprung up last
| year.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Isn't that Twitter spaces?
|
| Never heard of Clubhouse.
| filoleg wrote:
| Twitter Spaces was a direct response to Clubhouse becoming
| extremely hyped up during the first year of Covid.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Interesting, I didn't know.
|
| I've only ever seen Twitter Spaces not Clubhouse, that's
| why I asked.
| legerdemain wrote:
| 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.
| shafyy wrote:
| Does anybody remember the app Yo?
| omginternets wrote:
| I loved that app. My screen name was "IAMPOOPING" and I used to
| "yo" people when... you know ...
| jurassic wrote:
| Yo
| ja27 wrote:
| Bro
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Yo
| cande wrote:
| davidbarker wrote:
| 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.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| tegiddrone wrote:
| 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.
| davidbarker wrote:
| 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.
| rvz wrote:
| 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
| debuggerpk wrote:
| i think twitter spaces.
| nowherebeen wrote:
| 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.
| hevalon wrote:
| > 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).
| kowsheek wrote:
| You mean that iPhone advertisement?
|
| Pandemic Clubhouse NFT
|
| I call it the #Clubhouse Correlation.
| Mo3 wrote:
| That makes the most sense.
| miki123211 wrote:
| 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.
| latchkey wrote:
| 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.
| opdahl wrote:
| An interesting note on this is that Twitter are rolling out
| Speech to Text for their Spaces.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| 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?
| detaro wrote:
| No, it's not absurd to complain about stuff being moved to
| places you can't participate in.
| TedShiller wrote:
| 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.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| 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?
| chrisco255 wrote:
| 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.
| freedomben wrote:
| Clubhouse renamed to shortcut, but is otherwise still cruising.
| clubhouse.io now redirects to shortcut.com. Otherwise still
| runnin' fine.
| hobimatemaatik wrote:
| I mean clubhouse.com is their actual address
| spicybright wrote:
| That's a terrible name change lol. Might as well have been
| "social" or "desktop".
| willcipriano wrote:
| 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.
| Scandiravian wrote:
| 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
| freedomben wrote:
| 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
| mgamache wrote:
| 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.
| United857 wrote:
| 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.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| 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.
| doggerel404 wrote:
| But quora is still around and very useful- maybe even more so
| than during the hype period
| saurik wrote:
| 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. You are thereby 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.
| EEBio wrote:
| What kind of useful answers can be found on Quora these days?
| lordnacho wrote:
| Mainly articulate opinions on various questions that are
| open ended. "What regrets do you have?", that kind of
| thing.
| doggerel403 wrote:
| 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
| doggerel404 wrote:
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| Quora has much more staying power than Clubhouse, which
| was a novelty even in its honeymoon period.
| pollomonteros wrote:
| 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
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| 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.
| ohashi wrote:
| 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.
| xwdv wrote:
| 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.
| paulsutter wrote:
| It's easy to look at Clubhouse and think it was a bad investment
| / VCs fund terrible ideas / etc
|
| But given the tens of billions to trillion valuation of
| successful social networks, what probability of success made an
| investment at $100M valuation worthwhile, based on the initial
| traction ?
|
| And then we can see the logic behind even the more surprising VC
| investment decisions
| christopherslee wrote:
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Litost wrote:
| 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
| seanhunter wrote:
| 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.
| gutitout wrote:
| This is absolutely correct. They build a nice map of everyone's
| contacts and that was the value.
| mikeryan wrote:
| 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.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
| croes wrote:
| Remember Vero?
| martin_a wrote:
| 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...
| Kye wrote:
| 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.
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