[HN Gopher] Is social audio already dead?
___________________________________________________________________
Is social audio already dead?
Author : marban
Score : 116 points
Date : 2022-06-06 11:09 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thehustle.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (thehustle.co)
| Fede_V wrote:
| Beyond the criticism of the format, I found the explicit clout
| chasing to be completely offputting, and I think I used Clubhouse
| a grand total of 3x before never turning it on.
|
| I would genuinely love to read an anthropologist dive into what
| causes social networks to take that turn. At its best, Twitter is
| full of smart nerdy people talking about science, mathematics,
| history, etc..
|
| Clubhouse feels like LinkedIn, completely detached from resumes,
| so everyone wanted to post thinkpieces without being in any way
| tethered to their concrete achievements.
| rchaud wrote:
| But that begs the question: why would anyone of note use
| Clubhouse, if not as an continuation of the mostly "one-way
| megaphone" strategy that made them big on Twitter or elsewhere?
| sklargh wrote:
| What prevented Clubhouse from quickly devolving into an ersatz
| Discord. I feel like the audio chat capability + community
| management was already there.
| xnyan wrote:
| For one, iOS only is a non-starter.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I didn't even know it was sick.
| blululu wrote:
| I am a bit disappointed that discussions of audio based social
| media is basically limited to Clubhouse. Personally I really
| enjoyed using Dialup. I joined in ~2019 and it was a great place
| to have real conversations with total strangers. During the
| quarantines it was one of the best windows I had into the broader
| world.
|
| Having an intimate conversation with a total stranger is a
| totally novel form of human interaction and I personally had a
| lot of good experiences with the service, even though it received
| none of the massive VC backed hype and media accolades.
| Personally I think that the problem with clubhouse and its
| competitor clones is more about how they structured conversations
| and less about social audio as a medium.
| herunan wrote:
| It's not dead. It was popular because of it's novelty, and now
| it's just another form of communication or content consumption.
| Unfortunately for Clubhouse, that means that as soon as big
| social networks copy you, you need to innovate or die. Network
| effects of bigger social media are too powerful for Clubhouse, so
| it's a bit of an unfair fight.
| can16358p wrote:
| But is there any momentum in the big-network-copycats anyway?
|
| I believe it's not about Clubhouse in particular, but the whole
| idea, so even if Facebook copies it, it's still a dead-end (but
| would still do in order to dominate the space and keep users
| in).
| boringg wrote:
| I feel like clubhouse is A16z's greatest expected to be success
| flop. They invested heavily into this app both time, clout and
| money. Not that I think VCs are able to see the future but they
| do uptalk the vantage point they have being able to see the
| bleeding edge in live time. This one shows that even with the
| advantage that they didn't see it with the right perspective.
|
| FWIW I really enjoyed in the early days when there were certain
| people on platform. After a bit it became dilutive in content
| quality and it sadly seemed more like hucksters on platform. If
| Clubhouse has done a post mortem on how they didn't convert their
| insane growth - I wager it was that they didn't screen quality.
| ls612 wrote:
| Clubhouse grew during the pandemic when some people needed to
| signal to others that they weren't meeting in person. Once that
| need fell away it started dying.
| dayvid wrote:
| I think only 1-2 clubhouses I listened to were any good. It was
| gamed by opportunists and grifters lightning fast. Lots of noise
| with very little signal.
|
| I would enjoy it and Twitter spaces more if they supported replay
| w/ 2x speed, skipping over or only playing certain speakers, or
| some sort of auto-tagging on topics so you can skip to what's
| interesting.
| CedarMills wrote:
| I was an early Clubhouse user. The initial conversations were
| very beneficial and very interesting. Over time, as more people
| got access, it started to turn into virtue signaling sessions on
| one end and super wack conversations about crypto on the other.
| It basically turned into an audio version of Twitter. After a
| couple of months, I ended up deleting the application.
|
| My wife uses Marco Polo a lot with her family. It's a great way
| for them to maintain an async conversation. I think for group no
| larger than five people, it makes a lot of sense.
|
| Is social audio dead? No. I do think that the market size is
| definitely a lot smaller.
| joshstrange wrote:
| > The initial conversations were very beneficial and very
| interesting. Over time, as more people got access, it started
| to turn into virtue signaling sessions on one end and super
| wack conversations about crypto on the other.
|
| Eternal September all over again.
| testmasterflex wrote:
| Was always dead since there was no way prior to a conversation
| possible to assess the quality of it. Unless you are
| playing/horsing around, who's willing to play the lottery with
| their time like that?
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Was it ever particularly alive in the mainstream? Can't say I
| ever encountered anybody other than marketers/talking
| heads/influencers who were into it.
| randomdata wrote:
| This is the first I have ever heard of it, so I'm guessing not.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| They tried the classic strategy of making it invite-only (and
| iPhone-only) at first, and while this did work initially, I think
| it also established a culture of elitism that made me never want
| to install the app.
|
| That and I'm busy. I don't have time for appointment listening.
| Havoc wrote:
| Was never alive. Only reason clubhouse thrived briefly was
| artificial constraints to create an aura of exclusivity
| dannyw wrote:
| The Android version is still incredibly buggy and borderline
| unusable, one year in.
| tjpnz wrote:
| At a previous company I attended regular team lunches with a
| particularly obnoxious colleague. It wasn't that he was a bad
| guy, just a snob who liked the sound of his own voice and talking
| over people with his pseudo intellectual rantings and ravings.
|
| Clubhouse replicates that experience almost too well. The only
| thing missing is the food and the obligation to be present.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Does this site go into an endless reload loop for anyone else? I
| wonder if it's my content blockers or something else...
| zthrowaway wrote:
| Wasn't clubhouse taken over by political activists? I recall
| something like that contributing to its downfall.
| ppeetteerr wrote:
| It took only a moment to realize that Social Audio is about as
| healthy as Instagram: it's groups of people promoting themselves.
| If you want to have a call with your friends, that already
| exists. If you want legitimate information, you have podcasts.
| There are conferences, panels, etc. Clubhouse got the hype right,
| but the "market fit" wrong.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| I'm currently working on a social Audio take tied into podcasting
| (which is very much alive). The idea is to have live podcasting a
| la Twitch or YouTube live, including chat and tipping. You can
| also invite other people to record the show with and even bring
| in members from the audience. At the end, it let's you download
| everything as Mp3 for post editing and publishing as a podcast.
| The live discussion will remain open as part of
| https://podbabble.com.
|
| The thesis is that while social Audio with proprietary recordings
| and time bound broadcasts failed, adding a social aspect to the
| fastgrowing podcasting space while retaining creator control and
| open formats will succeed.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >The thesis is that while social Audio with proprietary
| recordings and time bound broadcasts failed, adding a social
| aspect to the fastgrowing podcasting space while retaining
| creator control and open formats will succeed.
|
| And how is that theory proving up?
| wolframhempel wrote:
| Dunno, not released yet :-)
| Claude_Shannon wrote:
| This was the first time I've ever heard of this term. I'm still
| not sure what it is exactly.
| eganist wrote:
| Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces (possibly deprecated), Spotify Live
| are three of the biggest.
|
| Apparently Twitter had been in talks to acquire Clubhouse for
| $4bil. Hindsight is 20/20.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Never actually tried it. From the descriptions I saw, it seemed
| like it would be like Twitter, but with actual yelling. Who would
| want that? Maybe the real product was better than that, but it
| didn't seem like a lot of incentive to try.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| I never used Clubhouse, but most Twitter Spaces aren't really
| like that. The reason is because unlike normal Twitter only a
| limited number of people are speakers, and you have to be
| selected by the host to speak. It's more like niche panel shows
| with a live audience, and sometimes Q+A with people being
| selected from the audience to ask a question.
| LegitShady wrote:
| but what advantage does that have against podcasts when you
| can't participate unless you know the host? I could just
| listen to a conversation that's been recorded and get the
| same benefit, without having to schedule a live conversation
| I can't take part in.
|
| I don't see the draw over a podcast style show. Most live
| audience questions suck.
| can16358p wrote:
| I always thought the idea of Clubhouse was just a boring hype and
| deleted the app within 24h of starting to use it.
|
| Always thought it was just me. Apparently it really was a hype.
| At least in that form of it.
| Thlom wrote:
| Everyone except some terminally online journalists and social
| media "experts" understood this was a hype and a stupid product
| doomed to fail.
| rchaud wrote:
| VCs were pumping this hard. Journalists wouldn't have cared
| if Musk and other famous people weren't popping in during the
| initial hype phase.
| system16 wrote:
| I got an invite when it started blowing up and gave it an honest
| try.
|
| Virtually every room I joined was filled with self-described
| "thought leaders" and influencers promoting themselves to each
| other, and the conversations were comically similar:
|
| - Start off by validating what a great community this is and how
| great and positive everyone is.
|
| - Story time: either a huge challenge they overcame to become the
| great success they are today, or trying to make the most basic
| common sense sound like some insightful breakthrough.
|
| - Repeat a few times, and then someone will "reset the room" and
| start over again.
|
| I couldn't help but laugh because I honestly couldn't believe it
| wasn't a parody.
| felipellrocha wrote:
| Same. I left thinking that the concept was cool, but the
| problem they had was discoverability. Bad actors were taking
| advantage of the system and pushing down good content. It was
| cool for the first 3 weeks when the content was amazing, and I
| felt like I was able to passively listen to fantastic content
| while working. Afterwards, it just became too much of a hassle
| to swift through everything in order to find the content I
| found interesting, so I left.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Sounds like a low-rent TED Talk.
| narrator wrote:
| I tried to have fun with Twitter's Periscope a year ago, which
| has been out for a while. It's a group video chat app where
| anyone can pop in. In that way it's sort of like clubhouse, but
| with video. When I would get on, it was 80% people sitting
| around talking to their friends, often in thick accents about
| nothing of particular interest (e.g people I don't know, things
| the chat participants experienced together that I have
| insufficient context to understand). That's probably 95% of the
| internet voice and video chats and I'm just not aware of it
| because I'm not randomly dropping in on people's conversations
| like you're allowed to do on periscope. Anyway, it's not the
| most easily monetizable thing, I'd imagine.
|
| On Telegram voice chat, there's always some jerk or lunatic who
| talks over everyone who the rest of the chat participants have
| to tell to shut up. I think this is just a telegram problem
| because clubhouse has better moderation features.
|
| Anyway, if you have a group of people you know and want to talk
| why not use Zoom? It's a better experience in every way. What's
| the benefit of letting random people drop in? Maybe with very
| clever moderation features it could work, but as is it seems
| kind of pointless.
| autoexec wrote:
| > Anyway, if you have a group of people you know and want to
| talk why not use Zoom?
|
| Because they're a terrible company who has repeatedly
| demonstrated that they're at best shockingly incompetent at
| protecting your data or at worst maliciously allowing it to
| be leaked and collected by 3rd parties.
|
| Still, there are a lot of non-zoom options for video chat
| that would be a better experience so your overall point still
| stands, but it's still just weird to see anyone ask "why not
| use Zoom?" when by this time you'd expect to hear "Why would
| anyone still use Zoom?"
| mbostleman wrote:
| Same experience here. I've had the lingering suspicion that
| live audio is too real and that it makes the lack of
| authenticity and narcissism of social media influencing too
| obvious. Maybe someone should try 15 second sound bites that
| are scripted, rehearsed, edited, and mixed with music.
| rchaud wrote:
| > Virtually every room I joined was filled with self-described
| "thought leaders" and influencers promoting themselves
|
| Talk is cheap. That's why this model doesn't work.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Text is cheaper, yet Twitter.
| rchaud wrote:
| Text is cheap to scale on Twitter, which is why it
| succeeded. Your message can be read and understood in a
| matter of seconds. That's much faster than listening to and
| processing an audio clip.
|
| Text tweets have infinite reach with enough retweets. It
| can be embedded on websites, drawing a new audience that
| doesn't spend time on Twitter. It doesn't disappear if you
| weren't there right when the tweet was being posted.
|
| Audio has none of these things. Nobody wants to watch a
| recorded stream, the whole appeal is that you are LIVE with
| everyone at the same time.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| This tangentially reminds me of a shameless puff piece on one
| of the financial networks about a startup lead by a "self-made
| man" who invested part of his trust fund into his business and
| whose father, worth over $250M at the time, was a major
| investor.
| alx__ wrote:
| The few rooms I found on Clubhouse that were interesting had a
| theme of reading bedtime/sleep stories.
|
| Which is essentially a live podcast to put you to sleep
| rchaud wrote:
| I would expect to get trolled in rooms like that; it just
| sounds too contrived to not be a troll. Calm gentle voice
| interrupted by loud screams just as you were about to fall
| asleep, things like that.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| So... LinkedIn in audio format?
|
| Sounds like a waking nightmare.
| kurthr wrote:
| It blew up mid-pandemic when tech/VC people were mostly trapped
| at home with little social to do, but drink delivered cocktails
| on Zoom.
|
| It also coincided a huge increase in bit/altcoin prices, which
| made pump/dump schemes profitable (especially early NFT).
| Politics also bloomed in Sept-Dec 2020 when BLM wanted
| somewhere to motivate as did those across the spectrum of
| "suppressed voices" after Jan 6.
|
| Yeah, pretty boring.
|
| https://www.boldspace.com/news/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of...
| chasing wrote:
| Agreed. Best case experiences were in rooms that felt like mid-
| tier tech conference panels.
|
| Clubhouse could've leaned into the above idea and really
| figured it out. Like, how do you mix the experience of a live
| in-person panel of experts and also leverage asynchrony across
| space and time... Maybe there would've been something there.
| But as it stood, it felt like it hit the jackpot with a clever
| idea and a bunch of hype but never actually solved any of the
| hard problems that might turn it into something real.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Clubhouse etc has made me even more suspicious of anyone who
| uses the term "thought leader" in any serious capacity
| celim307 wrote:
| It's a good filter for me to single out narcissists.
|
| Everyone wants to be a cult leader
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| This sounds like an audio version of LinkedIn.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| LinkedIn kind of creeps me out because it is the only social
| network I actively participate in as my authentic self.
| (Because I make games, I have to go on all kinds of things in
| test accounts) When people I know make an announcement and I
| see it I feel like I don't want to be supportive. And it is
| useful to know where people are working that you haven't seen
| for a while. But to post an article? I don't know.
| ruskibeats wrote:
| This, so much this!!!
| vlunkr wrote:
| Someone should make a platform like this that somehow de-
| incentivizes influencer culture. I want to see regular people
| having conversations, not trying to build a following. It's a
| poison that has snuck into essentially every social media
| platform.
| rglullis wrote:
| Join the Fediverse. Most people there have no interest in
| mainstream culture and none of the software is built in a way
| to gamify engagement.
|
| I keep thinking of putting together a bridge between twitter
| and my mastodon server, but I am always postponing it because
| it feels _wrong_.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| But that's an artifact of the groups of people that self-
| select onto that platform, not a property of the platform
| or its incentives itself. If it became as popular as other
| platforms it would attract people with similar goals as are
| on other platforms. The technology isn't intentionally
| designed to reward them, but they will still find rewards
| and pursue them if it is their best option.
| rglullis wrote:
| Not _necessarily_.
|
| Mastodon, Pleroma and Pixelfed _intentionally_ lack
| features that would be geared for influencers. Mastodon
| has no "quote tweet" to avoid having people taking
| conversations out of context. Pixelfed even has admin-
| controlled options to disable "likes" and display of
| counts altogether.
|
| The clients, having no "algorithm" beyond basic
| chronological sort, make it hard for influencers to game
| the system. And it wouldn't be too difficult to have an
| instance where users have limited follower counts to keep
| the conversation more personal.
| lokedhs wrote:
| It's not audio, but the Fediverse gives me that as an
| alternative to influencer centric networks (in particular
| twitter).
|
| As an alternative to instagram, there is Pixelfed, which
| integrates with all the other servers such as Mastodon or
| Pleroma.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| it's called a dinner party. you essentially _can 't_ have
| this "at scale" without creating the incentives leading to
| the contentification of it.
| gkop wrote:
| How about a service I can pay for that blocks/mutes for me
| anyone that's ever had a Clubhouse account, on all platforms?
| seattle_spring wrote:
| I'd pay for that.
| BbzzbB wrote:
| Any idea how does that work in practice? Seems to me like an
| unresolvable problem, granted I haven't given it much
| thought.
|
| If users are identifyable, cross-platform self-promotion is
| inevitable, it's kind of human nature. If users are anon,
| content is not curatable and quality is unlikely.
|
| I think Twitter Spaces is pretty decent FWIW. Communities
| already exist around certain topics, there's plenty of
| subcultures on Twitter. And the platform is already
| reputation-centric, you can make of it what you will by
| following appropriate people. So if a reputable person
| organizes (and curates speakers in) a Space for a given
| topic, it can make for decent conversations to tune it. Seems
| kind of as good as anon voice-chatrooms can get.
| bnralt wrote:
| One thing I remember was that discoverability was really
| difficult in Clubhouse. You could pick as many interests as
| you like, but it seemed like the feed would still spam you
| with a lot of stuff disconnected from your interests. When
| you found a good room, there was no way of following it for
| the next time it was open. Once it closed down, it was gone.
|
| It's a shame, because there were some very interesting rooms
| with good conversations. It's just that it became a chore to
| have to sift through all the garbage to find them.
|
| For everyone saying "why not just go out in real life?",
| that's not really an option if I'm cleaning the house for an
| hour, while clubhouse is. Also, some of those conversations
| (biologists discussing trends in the field with other
| biologists) aren't ones that are easy to just call up a few
| of your buddies to get.
| munificent wrote:
| I think that platform is called "the rest of the human
| experience outside of the Internet".
|
| Invite some friends over, hang out at a park, go to a bar,
| throw a party, attend church, join a club, play a sport.
| vlunkr wrote:
| I certainly agree with that, but also, isn't this the sort
| of communication that the Internet was built for? What if
| you live in the middle of nowhere and you want to chat with
| someone about something none of your neighbors are into? I
| feel like 20 years ago the Internet was great at this in
| text form.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| It seems interesting if it's possible to do those things
| "offline" without them getting taken over by "hustle", but
| not online.
|
| Like, at a bar, club, or sporting event in "real life", you
| might occasionally run into a finbro trying to talk to you
| about crypto, but it's not the dominant experience.
|
| But is there no way to do the equivalent things online (and
| there's no obvious reason there shouldn't be an online
| equivalent to a party or club or even sports league)
| without it being taken over by people who are there only to
| build their hustle?
| cjblomqvist wrote:
| Have you ever played online team games? I've played both
| offline and online games quite a lot and at least here in
| Sweden I feel it's quite similar.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Sure there is. There are probably millions of Discord
| servers used by small groups of people for a common
| purpose. Same thing with Mastodon instances and
| subreddits. You don't hear about them because they're not
| trying to take over the world or build some huge
| platform. They're just groups of people that want to hang
| out with each other.
| diputsmonro wrote:
| The reason it's so prevalent online is because those
| people are gaming the system to appear prevalent. They
| talk up themselves and their brand/product to get likes,
| follows, and "engagement", which the social media
| algorithms use to rank and display content.
|
| "Real life" doesn't have an algorithm that is so easily
| gamed, but there are still ways to "game" it. Going to
| popular locations (e.g. bars), looking
| presentable/knowledgeable, social engineering, buying
| advertisements, setting up seminars, etc. But in real
| life a lot of these are much easier to avoid because
| there's simply so much more to life that drowns them out.
| Real life doesn't have a front page that tells you what
| the most popular person said today -- that is the
| function of social media (or newspapers).
|
| Of course, social media platforms could be built that
| don't prioritize content this way, either by using more
| complicated algorithms that are less easily gameified, or
| simpler algorithms that cannot be gamified (e.g. simple
| chronological ranking), or letting the user have more
| control over the ranking algorithm. But there is
| currently no simple market incentive for doing so.
|
| That said, I could totally see that shifting even in the
| coming decade. I think people are getting tired of being
| advertised to, and transparently being treated as second-
| class citizen on these platforms. I could see a "premium"
| alternative to Facebook/Twitter becoming popular, with a
| small monthly subscription fee in exchange for much more
| user control and user-centric design.
|
| Of course, more user control means more opportunities for
| filter bubbles and cultural fragmentation, which as we've
| seen are pretty bad for democracy. I suppose there is no
| easy solution to anything.
| munificent wrote:
| It's definitely possible to find the same thing online.
| Most of the online spaces I hang out in aren't like that:
| here, the various subreddits I joined, my fairly
| carefully culled Twitter feed, etc.
| robonerd wrote:
| Internet itself isn't the problem. You could organize all
| of those IRL get-togethers using email. Influencer culture
| isn't a problem that effects email. Similarly, you can use
| discord, zoom, skype, IRC, SMS... all of these are broadly
| free of influencer culture.
|
| Influencer culture is something that emerges on a
| _particular sort_ of internet communication; mostly on the
| commercial platforms that specialize in asymmetric
| communication (where a few people produce and the majority
| consume.) To keep the consuming majority engaged, these
| platforms constantly recommend they follow the producing
| minority. Influencer culture is an inevitable consequence
| of this dynamic.
| munificent wrote:
| Good observation!
|
| I suspect that we ourselves are partially to blame here.
|
| Influencer culture isn't a problem on email, IRC, etc.
| because when we use those we expect ourselves to be
| active participants. We take for granted that we have to
| show up and provide something of interest to the others
| in the forum.
|
| But when we go on Twitter, YouTube, etc. we expect to
| just mindlessly consume content without giving anything
| back. That creates an attentional vacuum where everyone
| wants to consume and no one wants to produce. Influencers
| fill that vacuum because no one else does.
|
| In other words, email is like a potluck dinner and we
| would feel rude walking in without a dish. Other
| asymmetric social media is like a free picnic where
| everyone shows up empty handed and ends up eating from
| the giant tub of fries that McDonald's brought as a
| marketing campaign because, well, what else is there?
|
| So maybe the trick is to avoid communities that you don't
| contribute to.
| AgentME wrote:
| Online mediums that do one-on-one conversations (instant
| messaging, etc) or small group chats of people who know each
| other don't have this issue, but they're also pretty limiting
| for meeting new people. It seems like there's a trade-off
| between a platform making it easy to discover new people
| versus a platform fostering conversations between invested
| people participating equally. The largest social platforms
| have been the ones that are better on the discover-new-people
| side while doing worse on the other side.
| sheepybloke wrote:
| I feel like discord is pretty good at this.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| This is the impression I got as well, and I didn't even have to
| use the app. I got the sense that all anyone cared about was
| growing their Clubhouse community, rather than using it because
| they liked it.
|
| It's hard to quantify or put your finger on it, but there was
| all this "hustle culture" around Clubhouse. Everyone talked
| about how great it was and how it was going to transform social
| media. But it was clear in that few believed it and just wanted
| to be the first to pitch their tent on new plot social media.
|
| As a result Clubhouse had a certain "emptyness" to it. Everyone
| was talking about how great it was and how great it was going
| to be, but there wasn't any actual content, just people
| repeating that message over and over again, or adjacent "hustle
| culture" topics like Stocks, Crypto, GaryVee Worship, etc.
| Since people in this space are very vocal online, you got the
| impression right off the bat that Clubhouse was skyrocketing in
| popularity, but it ended up being that you just had a small
| group of people in an echo chamber.
| LegitShady wrote:
| clubhouse doesn't scale because the more people are talking, the
| less you can tell which conversation is important or matters. The
| success of clubhouse is its own destruction.
| rullopat wrote:
| Social audio has the same problem of an audio message: it comes
| always in the moment you cannot listen to it. Even worse, a
| message from a friend or relative has much bigger priority.
| mgamache wrote:
| Dead? No. But it's not the wildly popular service that people
| thought it would be. Clubhouse is mostly a dumpster fire. Someone
| might figure out the right way to do it, but right now it's a
| clunky mess of toxic rooms with the occasional substantive
| conversation.
| seydor wrote:
| I think the whole trend started because some vcs thought that
| their own voices were important and needed to be heard. Looked
| like a vanity sector overall
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Yeah, VC's that invested were propping it up, I saw this cycle
| repeat on there.
|
| 1. Some influential investor/entrepreneur/vs/elon musk type
| would tweet about the app.
|
| 2. The tweet would gain traction, news media would pick it up
| and write a story.
|
| 3. News articles were a sign that the app was "popular".
|
| 4. Everyone kept harping on about "installs".
|
| Though it appeared that Clubhouse was going viral in
| popularity. It was really just a media echo chamber fueled by
| the "installs". People would hear about the app, install it and
| create an account, then play with it for 5 minutes before never
| opening the app again. But that mere install caused the cycle
| above to repeat.
|
| In the end you had a ton of "installs", and barely any active
| users.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Just like the short-lived social olfactory trend started
| because some vcs thought their shit didn't stink.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISmell
|
| https://www.wired.com/1999/11/digiscent/
|
| https://thehustle.co/digiscents-ismell-fail
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17476460
| barrysteve wrote:
| Nobody would put the smell of shit over a picture of
| anything. Electronic olfactory stimulation would cement
| marketing associations for children aged 0-12. If somebody
| ever figured out the technical side of delivering smells
| affordable and instantly, he/she would have subtle influence
| over people years after they are exposed to the initial
| entertainment product that built an association and memory in
| the child.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| I take it you haven't heard of Prolitec[0].
|
| Olfactory memory is exceptionally strong[1], and if a
| marketer could successfully tap into it, I imagine very
| positive outcomes.
|
| [0] https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/prolitec-reinvents-
| ambien...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_memory
| nix0n wrote:
| I thought you were posting April Fools articles until I saw
| the YYYY/MM part of the Wired URL.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Exactly. The real question is, Was Social Audio Ever Alive?
| Betteridge's Law applies.
| luc_ wrote:
| zeruch wrote:
| "Is social audio already dead?"
|
| One can hope...
| goopthink wrote:
| Using Clubhouse as the end-all for social audio does the "space"
| a disservice, IMO. I used Clubhouse early on and it fell squarely
| into every single trope and commentary that everyone here is
| posting about it.
|
| Much later, I was introduced to "Cappuccino" [1], a social audio
| app that couldn't be more different from Clubhouse. It's slow-
| social (you only get updates once day (the cappuccino composed of
| 'beans' that everyone submits). Each audio update is capped at 3
| minutes (though you can submit as many as you'd like), and you
| can attach a photo if you'd like. The app auto-adds some generic
| intro/outtro music and production cleanup and combines it into a
| single podcast-like update.
|
| I've found myself using this pretty actively with small groups of
| friends. The audio-first approach makes it easy to just talk
| about something (an idea, a life update) for a few moments (low
| cost to participate). The production value and once-a-day update
| makes it feel like a nice 'ritual' to receive everyone's updates.
| The intentionally asyncronousness emphasizes listening and
| thoughtfulness against trying to hop on to a comment thread. It
| honestly feels like sending postcards/letters out to folks... but
| audio. Can you do this as an audio group text? Kind of, yes. But
| that's like saying "you can recreate instagram by sending photos
| over whatsapp." Yes, but that misses the point.
|
| I'm not affiliated in any way with them but I think they're a
| very neat counterpoint to Clubhouse in terms of "social audio"
| (and slow vs fast social).
|
| [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cappuccino-stay-in-
| touch/id150...
| soneca wrote:
| > _" I 've found myself using this pretty actively with small
| groups of friends"_
|
| Would people listen to these small updates?
|
| Audio is pretty big in WhatsApp. But it's widely accepted that
| audio messages are good for people who send it and bad for who
| receive (it is a hassle to listen to it, even at 2x, comparing
| to reading a text message).
|
| Also, your use case seems very well covered by WhatsApp and
| Telegram.
|
| I am part of a Telegram from a famous writer where he only
| sends audio messages (one-to-many, closed threads, only accepts
| emojis). It is hard to differentiate a product enough as an
| audio only social network to beat Telegram and WhatsApp on most
| use cases.
| Flimm wrote:
| Cappuccino only delivers audio messages the next morning, all
| mixed together in one audio track. You listen to it at your
| leisure, like drinking a morning coffee, or at least that's
| the idea. I find WhatsApp voice messages annoying, as I can't
| tell if they're urgent or not without listening to the full
| audio message after scrambling to find my headphones. In
| contrast, I know Cappuccino voice messages aren't urgent,
| since they're only delivered to me the next morning.
|
| I tried it with a group of friends, but it didn't take off,
| sadly, for a couple of reasons. But I did not feel annoyed by
| them the way I do for WhatsApp voice messages. I hope
| Cappuccino takes off, I think it's a good idea that with good
| execution that deserves to succeed.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| This reminded me of this absolutely hilarious Twitter thread:
| https://twitter.com/ShaanVP/status/1371972261004070913
|
| >Emily wants to know about the future. Are the rumors true? Will
| you add VIDEO to clubhouse??
|
| >You pause dramatically.
|
| >... "Video is a bug, not a feature"
|
| >Boom. F*cking Nailed It
| gregmac wrote:
| This thread is really good, some key points I took:
|
| > But clubhouse is LIVE. So you need something INTERESTING
| that's ALSO happening RIGHT NOW.
|
| > Your engineers [..] warn you: multiplying "content is
| interesting" and "content is live" doesn't just make the
| problem 2x harder..it makes it 200x harder.
|
| > You rebuttle: "Well - Twitch figured out how to do this!
| Twitch is live content - so clearly it's possible!"
|
| > 1 - twitch creators are live ~40 hours a week. Our best
| creators do weekly shows. ~3-4 hrs a week max. The game makes
| content creation easier
|
| > 2 -Twitch is vertically focused (gaming). Clubhouse is
| horizontal. You need "great content" across EVERY category.
|
| ...
|
| > Creators with big audience (proven good content) don't want
| to switch platforms. Spend an hour "live" on clubhouse reaching
| 2,000 people... or do a podcast and reach 200,000?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1371972261004070913.html
| macspoofing wrote:
| That thread is awesome. Prescient too.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Reading this Twitter thread made me wonder if the future of
| Clubhouse is in the business sector.
|
| My company has monthly "all hands" meetings where the C-levels
| dog and pony about what's coming up. Using Zoom for this was OK
| when everyone was working across two time zones. But in the
| COVID era we're spread out across many more.
|
| If Clubhouse could come up with a super-easy and super-
| attractive way for businesses to time-shift this content, it
| could find paying subscribers. Something along the lines of
| "Listen (Watch?) the leaders at 10:00amET, or the replays at
| 10:00amPT, or 9:00amGMT." Recorded, but with the appointment
| urgency of live.
|
| I know that many tools like Zoom or Teams have the ability to
| record the video for people to consume later, but from what
| I've heard from the people in the HR department, it's either
| complicated, or time-consuming, or both. And for people who are
| more audio-focused, many times that's a better way to go.
| shampine wrote:
| We use Google Meet, which offers a live + stream feature for
| large groups. Most folks join the stream over the live meet.
| But within an ~hour after the all hands it's available
| directly in the calendar invite to rewatch.
|
| It seems like a solved problem?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Is there a description of the cycle that failed products or
| innovations go through? For successful ones, there's,
|
| _First, they laugh at you,_
|
| _Then, they tell you it 's not in the orthodoxy,_
|
| _Then they tell you they knew it all along._
|
| As trite and simplistic as that is, I find it to be a reliable
| prediction; I think what it really reflects is an instinct to
| resist change, to unconsciously follow the status quo. By the
| last stage, the innovation becomes the status quo and it's
| sincere in one way: the people who 'knew it all along' truly
| followed the status quo all along.
|
| What is the cycle for failed innovations? An end stage is
| schadenfreude. In fact, the end stage is exactly the same: They
| 'knew' all along that it would fail, it just has some
| schadenfreude added.
|
| All the stages may be the same. If someone predicts every
| challenging innovation will fail, they'll usually be right! And
| regardless, they are sticking with the status quo throughout.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Can't think anyone who ever sat through it as a listener ever saw
| it going anywhere.
|
| It was like the worst possible parts of a podcast amplified 1000%
| with zero of the upsides.
|
| Just self-important low-talent bluechecks blowing smoke up each
| other in a self-promo-off.
| Alacart wrote:
| Despite many knocking it here, I think there's at least one
| significant aspect of the clubhouse/twitter spaces/etc. model of
| audio chat: the _much_ stronger feeling of connection that people
| get from being able to literally speak to the big personalities
| in whatever their area of interest is.
|
| we can debate whether that's good or bad, scalable, a feature or
| a product. But I think it's undeniable that the emotional
| dopamine hit people get from that are a lot higher than getting
| any kind of async response, especially text. It makes it feel
| much more real. Even if you don't interact at all and just
| listen, it feels like you're an insider, you've made it into the
| club, and you _could_ speak up. Like you practically know
| <insert names>, you were on a call with them earlier today!
|
| That kind of interaction I think we might see a lot more of as a
| feature for e.g. streaming platforms. People crave it.
| na85 wrote:
| That's exactly what their value prop was. Normies get a chance
| to feel like they're friends with famous people.
|
| It's social status signalling as a service.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Clubhouse was unfortunate to come about in the crypto boom. lots
| of inate crypto chat on there.
| Uehreka wrote:
| Yeah, but that's just one part of its local maximum. If crypto
| didn't exist, I feel confident the hustle porn, personal
| finance and entrepreneurship stuff (more "How I Make $1000/mo
| In Passive Income"-style content and less Startup School) would
| rush to fill the gap.
| drannex wrote:
| At the very least that would be marginally tenable to deal
| with and would have /some/ sort of variety to the
| conversation.
| can16358p wrote:
| Or perhaps the crypto boom made it popular in a way which it
| would never be in the first place?
|
| Crypto at least gave it a chance.
| fullshark wrote:
| The main people interested in talking to large groups of
| strangers are selling something, if not crypto boom it would be
| something else.
| lmm wrote:
| On the contrary, I suspect it wouldn't have enjoyed what
| success it had without being able to lean on some very monetary
| FOMO.
| schlupfknoten wrote:
| Seems to affect Twitter as well. Every time I've checked out
| the Spaces tab in the app, the featured Spaces were 90% NFT /
| crypto promotion.
| [deleted]
| madmax108 wrote:
| I feel like Clubhouse fell bang in the "This is a feature, not a
| product" [1] hole and have simply not been able to get out of it,
| esp once other apps came up with their own live-audio
| functionality (and given how Twitter and Clubhouse were very
| closely entwined, the launch of Twitter Spaces and Twitter
| pushing it quite aggressively was probably the nail in the
| coffin).
|
| Honestly though, I always felt like live audio was just a
| pandemic-era overhyped field[2] which still needs a few years in
| the sun before becoming ready for primetime, because the current
| implementations do not really bring anything fresh (or useful
| imo) to the table that other forms of communication don't bring
| with them (be it Youtube livestreams or podcasts or whatnot)
|
| [1] https://www.yannickoswald.com/post/the-hottest-question-
| in-v...
|
| [2] And it's not just limited to Clubhouse, but also region
| specific apps like Leher (https://leher.app/) which pivoted from
| social audio to some weird "do tasks to earn money" model
| CydeWeys wrote:
| It's definitely a feature, not a product. I've listened to a
| few of the live discussions on Twitter between experts in the
| Ukraine War (e.g. Michael Kofman and Rob Lee were in it), and
| definitely found that worthwhile. It was, essentially, a live
| podcast, that took some live questions.
|
| So unlike some of the other commenters in this thread, I do
| think it has some value and isn't just for VCs' vanity, but it
| also just feels like a feature. I would never go out of my way
| to a site that only does this, but when I see a notification of
| a live stream when I'm already using Twitter, and the subject
| sounds interesting, I might join.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| When your primary means of user acquisition is via somebody
| else's social network then this will always happen. Clubhouse
| built a neat little feature and then tried to leverage Twitter
| to get people to use it. But then Twitter just built it
| themselves and took all the lunch money. This has happened
| numerous times. Another high-profile example was
| Meerkat/Periscope. The best you can hope for is to be
| acquired/acqui-hired by said social network a la Periscope. But
| that's very rare.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| To be honest most of them start out as features. Their hope is
| to quickly add enough adjacent features, to retain users by
| keeping them engaged, surrounding an anchor use case before a
| competition rolls out their anchor use-case as a feature.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Any parasocial relationships[1] have to be one way to be
| effective at mass scale. You can't have all of a person's fans
| talk at the same time. Podcasts are a form of social audio that
| scales well. Anything that lets someone talk 1:1 with their fans
| is going to have to have a rate throttling mechanism.
|
| For a while, the obscurity of a platform itself serves as that
| rate limiter. However, once it kicks off something must replace
| it, such as pay to meet, or recreating obscurity by random un-
| announced appearances, etc.
|
| 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Ding ding ding!!!
|
| This.
|
| There are two fundamental problems in mass communication. One
| is easy, the second is hard.
|
| The easy one is _transmission_ at scale. That is, how does
| _one_ voice reach _many_. The forum, the printing press, radio,
| and television all address this problem.
|
| The hard one is _feedback_ at scale.
|
| There's a profound truth hidden in the adoption of the term
| "broadcast" to describe radio and television, adopted from
| agriculture, in which a farmer cast seed grain broadly, and,
| after some cultivation and tending, _harvests the result_. The
| fact that this applies most especially to staple grain crops,
| in which the key to harvesting is to _not_ treat each
| individual plant as its own special snowflake. For broadcast
| media, the harvesting mechanism eventually turned out to be
| advertising.
|
| It's also interesting to see how scaling feedback has been an
| ongoing problem with the tech sector. It's easy for a small
| team to create a tool used by millions or billions of people.
| It's _hard_ to assimilate feedback from that community in ways
| that truly add to the value of the product. Mechanisms such as
| A /B testing often cannibalise long-term value to provide a
| very short-term, small-scale boost.
|
| In live-lecture formats, I find Q&A sessions to be hugely
| variable. The best seem to come from small and cultivated
| audiences, most especially where questions are submitted
| (usually in writing) and selected for presentation. The worst
| are both general audiences (questions seem to reflect shallow
| familiarity with the topic), _or_ `cultivated but politicised
| groups, in which questions are far more often grandstanding
| performance art presentations.
|
| Wikipedia's article on scholasticism has a description of the
| lecture format used at the time, which has long struck me as
| one that would be interesting (and challenging) to implement in
| an onlyline sense:
|
| - Lectio: the reading to be considered.
|
| - Meditatio: a time for contemplating what was read.
|
| - Questiones: a discussion of written submitted questions, with
| controvertial questions being addressed in _Disputationes_.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism#Scholastic_instr...
|
| These were probably sessions with a small group of ~10--15
| students, roughly the size of a modern college seminar.
| Intimacy and familiarity seem key to this, and are the precise
| opposite of scaling.
| self_awareness wrote:
| Well I _wanted_ to register and use it, but registration was
| closed. I 've subscribed to be notified when the registration
| will be open again, but notification never came. Later I forgot
| about it completely.
| throwk8s wrote:
| I never registered for Clubhouse, and forgot about it so
| completely I can't remember why I wasn't interested. There was
| a reason but I forgot what it was.
|
| In the meantime I listened to a few interesting current-events
| discussions on Twitter Spaces, but only by coincidence that I
| happened to see them as I was browsing right after work. I
| don't see how anyone can build a business on _only_ this type
| of content, it 's too synchronous.
| smt88 wrote:
| Only the tiny minority of "very online" people ever thought it
| was mainstream in the first place.
| xnorswap wrote:
| I'm a "very online" person and I've never heard of clubhouse
| outside of recent HN articles.
| jaywalk wrote:
| I'm not "very online" at all and I felt like I heard about
| Clubhouse constantly when it launched.
| smt88 wrote:
| From mainstream media looking for trends, or from people
| you knew who used it?
| jaywalk wrote:
| Mostly from the media. I only know a handful of people
| who even tried it out.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I think you had to be very on Twitter and probably following
| people at least adjacent to VC
| ditsuke wrote:
| Not very online enough. But really, i think it's more about
| your online influence sphere. I've been on the intersection
| and seen a side where it's big, the other where it's not even
| felt.
| pjmlp wrote:
| For me it never started, as I never got the point of them.
|
| They seemed to evolve into another kind of TED talks, but even
| without trying to do anything quality wise in proper content.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| No, it's alive and well, you just aren't invited. You can't
| engineer or buy access into communities that you are not cool
| enough to be a part of. If you do somehow manage it, the core
| people who made the community cool before you showed up will
| quickly move elsewhere
|
| SV nerds gotta stop trying to invite themselves to cool people
| parties, it's cringe. Accept your limitations as well as your
| strengths. Accept that real membership in those communities has a
| price that you are not actually willing and/or able to pay
| krnlpnc wrote:
| I hope so. It's a very wasteful and low resolution way to share
| information.
|
| We've had telephones and group calls since before we had
| computers, and there is a reason why we shifted to text.
|
| Plus the platform is inherently not accessibility friendly.
|
| It just makes no sense overall, but I can see why it was quick
| burning fad.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| On the contrary, voice is too high resolution. Live and
| interactive, with no video to distract, makes it immediately
| obvious when someone is bullshitting you, compared to text
| (especially 140char limited) or pre-recorded videos/podcasts.
|
| The only thing clubhouse would be worth for is improv comedy,
| but there are not enough good troupes.
| petercooper wrote:
| I am a "very online" industry analyst type and I enjoyed
| listening to a lot of Clubhouse chats in late 2020. It wasn't all
| nonsense - there was value to be had, particularly around
| gathering current thoughts and, sometimes, inside baseball on
| various topics, technologies or companies, but you had to listen
| to a _lot_ to get any gold. Podcasts are far more efficient if
| you 're in a sector that has some good ones and if you really
| want to chat yourself, you'd probably do better to just create
| your own podcast or attend some networking events.
|
| That said, Twitter is a _slightly_ different kettle of fish. Some
| of the live OSINT spaces around the invasion of Ukraine were
| hours ahead of mainstream media and did some amazing work earlier
| this year. Smaller community groups also seem able to use them
| productively to organize in a way that Clubhouse didn 't seem to
| allow, perhaps because people already have social graphs on
| Twitter.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Part of it is the synchronous-asynchronous difference.
|
| Clubhouse requires you to be logged in and listening throughout
| the whole discourse, most other forms of "social media"
| (Twitter, Facebook, forums, ...) let you drop in and out.
|
| Clubhouse also fails to scale because only one person can be
| talking at a time. As the number of people in a room N
| increases, this becomes an increasing limitation... One of
| those that any software developer should have been able to tell
| you about ahead of time.
|
| That's a serious enough scaling problem on it's own but
| socially some people are real blowhards who never quit talking
| while other people are more like
|
| https://mlp.fandom.com/wiki/Fluttershy#Shyness
|
| and that is all complicated by social dynamics, gender, class,
| race, hierarchies, power relationships, etc.
|
| That OSINT group for instance with N people could have an
| output proportional to O(N) if there is no need for
| coordination between the people, but if everyone is paying full
| attention to the discussion it is only going to have O(1)
| productivity.
| Mixtape wrote:
| With regard to the output productivity of the conversation,
| there's also something to be said about the "narrative
| control" that limiting speaking to a single person at a time
| brings.
|
| With voice platforms (including things like Discord, Zoom,
| etc.), there's always one thread of conversation going on.
| The meeting is generally a point A to point B discourse where
| circling back to examine a topic further is awkward and
| destroys the overall flow. People want to avoid that, so
| anyone who can manage to dominate the conversation and stop
| other people from interjecting has the power to effectively
| manage what comes next. There's a lot of potentially valuable
| conversations that get lost along the way as a result.
|
| As an aside, I've seen this bleeding into real-world
| conversations over the past few years as well. Pre- and post-
| COVID conversations with my peers in college were staunchly
| different in how they handled side conversations. Perhaps
| it's just a product of my cohort getting older and more
| accustomed to the norms of professional communication, but
| I've noticed far fewer productive side conversations in
| groups of roughly 7 or more and a much stronger focus on
| "staying on-topic".
|
| Text-based platforms have long since managed this issue with
| reply-based systems, threads, and hierarchical, nested
| conversations (e.g. HN, Reddit, etc.). This is really only
| possible asynchronously, though. In a voice format, the best
| you can do is leave to a breakout room or other channel and
| come back when you're done, but in doing so you're missing
| out on the conversation in the main thread. Unless we can
| somehow find a way to work past that limitation, I'm
| convinced that practically any platform that relies entirely
| on voice is going to fail to have the reach and community-
| building effect that something like Discord or Reddit has
| achieved.
|
| Additionally, all of this also fails to consider the fact
| that synchronous-only voice is yet another social distractor
| that demands your attention on someone's terms other than
| your own. As seems to be the sentiment on HN, I'm pretty
| staunchly opposed to normalizing yet another consumer of my
| time as necessary for social acceptance, but perhaps I'm a
| bad sample of the public opinion.
|
| Apologies if I repeated a bit of what you said here, but the
| point I'm trying to make is that you're entirely right about
| the obviousness of this issue. It doesn't take much
| consideration of the concept to realize that there's an
| immediate growth problem. Novel as the idea behind social
| audio might have been, it was doomed from the figurative (and
| literal) word one.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| My son hates on Discord pretty seriously and so do I.
|
| I had fun joining Discords to coordinate play in _League of
| Legends_ , but there are few things I dread more than the
| open source project than the open source project that says
| "join our Discord".
|
| There are numerous problems such as: discords are often
| divided into _way_ too many sub-rooms, somebody with too
| much time on their hands is always the first person to
| introduce the forum to people joining, etc.
| Mixtape wrote:
| Yeah, in retrospect Discord may not have been the best
| example for the point I was trying to make.
|
| As much as I like what it does right, I also have a lot
| of criticisms of it. The "too may channels" issue is
| _absolutely_ real, and it makes a lot of servers
| overwhelming. It 's also not indexable at all, meaning I
| often have to resort to using the search bar if something
| isn't pinned. Admittedly the latter of these isn't the
| worst experience (Discord search outpaces Slack search by
| a mile in my experience) but the fact of the matter is
| that finding a specific moment in a conversation in
| Discord is far more difficult than it is on something
| like a mid-2000s forum unless threads are required and
| their usage is enforced.
|
| More important though is the point you made about
| "somebody with too much time on their hands." Discord
| definitely pushes the boundaries of asynchrony at times.
| On bigger servers, it definitely feels like catching up
| on past messages is less favorable than being online and
| active as often as possible. This isn't necessarily
| anything new (while I've never used it, I've heard that
| IRC occasionally faces a similar issue) but something
| about it being baked into the nature of the service can
| feel very invasive at times. I've yet to find a community
| on Discord that I felt really bonded with outside of
| people I know IRL or through friends because contribution
| is far too often king.
|
| Perhaps there are more similarities than I realized
| between Discord and social audio in the general-use case.
| Single-stream communication divided up into rooms,
| favoring of the most active individuals, and an emphasis
| on synchronicity seem to be common traits between the
| two. I'm not sure what this could mean for Discord in the
| future, though.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| It always sounded like audio blogs to me.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Isn't that a podcast?
|
| There is also a genre of Youtube video that competes with
| podcasts. Channels like
|
| https://www.youtube.com/c/BattleshipNewJersey
|
| and
|
| https://www.youtube.com/c/Defunctland
|
| have good visuals but have stand-alone audio tracks and
| make great background noise when you are doing something
| else.
| thaway2839 wrote:
| This is the ultimate problem with Clubhouse/Twitter
| spaces.
|
| Podcasts exist. And they're already great for 1 way audio
| communication.
|
| So Clubhouse had to push for N-way audio communication as
| a differentiator, and it's really hard for that to be
| useful.
|
| It's really rare for the audience's contribution to be
| useful. And it's even rarer for the audience contribution
| to be useful in a way that cannot be done equally as
| well, if not better, in an associated chat room with a
| live podcast.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| $4 Billion acquisition talks with Twitter is going to be revealed
| as the mother of lost opportunity
| [deleted]
| me_me_mu_mu wrote:
| Most rooms were just self absorbed narcissistic people talking to
| each other.
|
| "Social" anything is a wasteland. Just build useful tools that
| help people do things, like buy plane tickets.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| Twitter Spaces is actually a reasonably good product. I heard
| that Twitter offered to acquire Clubhouse but Clubhouse turned
| them down - that was a bad decision.
| jsonne wrote:
| It's not dead it just got effectively integrated into existing
| networks like Twitter. I love spaces! I think there will be more
| innovation in the future with social audio but clubhouse felt
| like a flash in the pan to be sure.
| Chris86 wrote:
| I think Clubhouse was perhaps another VC pump and dump. Not
| necessarily deliberate, but that general flavour of startup that
| investors hoped to massive inflate and grab market share, with
| the expectation that there is some early mover advantage to be
| had in a new category. But because they were only manufacturing
| demand, rather than creating something people really wanted, it's
| just not worked out.
| rvz wrote:
| > I think Clubhouse was perhaps another VC pump and dump.
|
| Attempted* quick pump and dump. They tried to get Twitter to
| acquire it for $4B and that failed so they are now scrambling
| to make money or make it worthy of an IPO.
|
| Since either outcome is unlikely, they are most likely to do a
| down-round with more layoffs as a consequence and probably
| close down in the next 5 years.
| throw457 wrote:
| Someone should tell them about discord.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| and mumble, vent, xfire, teamspeak. Social audio isn't dead,
| it's one of the most consistently good aspects of technology
| because these idiots haven't figured out how to ruin it by
| trying to monetize the social aspects of it. I've spent my
| evening in a voice chat for the last 20 years, it's a solved
| problem.
| mikhmha wrote:
| Social audio isn't dead - I see it becoming a more prominent
| feature on existing social networks. Never used or heard about
| Clubhouse when it came out but recently I've been using Twitter
| spaces and I've found it to be very valuable. In financial
| twitter I've joined spaces with some great discussion that I
| can't seem to find anywhere else. Big part of it is the drop-in
| drop-out nature of it. So you'll have analysts from different
| sectors joining a space to offer their 2cents and ask really
| great questions. Really all you need to do is @ a blue checkmark
| and there is a high chance they will join to weigh in.
|
| I can see LinkedIn adding a feature like this in the future -
| though I think LinkedIn spaces would be terrible (insane amount
| of self-promotion ugh). Reddit is already testing it.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Good riddance. I hope a16z lost a lot of money.
| baryphonic wrote:
| A lot of the comments here are saying that Clubhouse is a lot of
| noise and very little signal. I largely agree that's what did it
| in, but I think I joined right before it hit that growth
| inflection point, and I was able to find something of a community
| until everyone kind of gave up.
|
| One night I had a discussion with a guy who had protested at
| Tiananmen Square in 1989, then went back to his university the
| day before the tanks rolled in. Later, he emigrated to the US.
|
| I met and befriended another guy who lived in Austin and was
| giving updates about the then-current Texas freeze. He was
| loosely connected to some of the folks behind NumPy/Anaconda, and
| so I got to spend several nights hanging out with them, which was
| pretty interesting.
|
| The biggest problem was always search/reputation (judging from my
| re-opening of the app for the first time in months, this is still
| the biggest problem). It was always gamed by "influencer" types,
| whose number one skill was glomming onto the New Hotness/Current
| Thing. Usually when opening the app, I'd need to scroll through
| one or two screen lengths of junk (e.g. "chat w/ [retired pro
| athlete] NFTs!!!", "be your own record label!!!") to find a topic
| that seemed remotely interesting.
|
| Filtering was (is?) hot garbage until I was following around 50
| active users. The product people never realized that the truly
| influential people who were interesting were not on Clubhouse 16
| hours a day, but would be on for an hour or two; the rest of the
| time, they were honing their craft at something outside of
| influencer culture.
|
| The other major problem was notification fatigue. I went through
| a phase of intense work on a side project, and didn't have time
| for Clubhouse very often. The app had some bug where it wouldn't
| respect my relatively spartan notification preferences, and was
| pinging me all the time, so I just disabled them altogether. A
| couple months later, I realized I had not been in there for a
| while, and when I logged in, few of the people I had connected
| with were still active (this was around a year ago).
|
| Ultimately, I think Clubhouse was an idea that in its current
| implementation could only exist during the pandemic. That being
| said, at times it felt like YouTube did back in '06 or Twitter in
| 2010: you could connect with anyone and learn about nearly any
| topic with a bit of dedication. Unlike a lot of the social
| networking experiences these days, it truly felt like there was a
| chance to meet someone who in the regular course of life you'd
| never get to meet.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I got an invite but never signed up, it always felt like
| "podcasts but worse". I mean sure, there was the opportunity to
| interact in the audience but I really dislike "forced-realtime"
| anything. Also the chances that people I look up and respect were
| on ClubHouse (or similar), at a time I was free, talking about
| something I had input on, and (most importantly) wanted input
| from the audience were about 0.
| gregmac wrote:
| > it always felt like "podcasts but worse".
|
| Even without the live/realtime aspect, I think it can be summed
| up by:
|
| > I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the
| time.
|
| > - Blaise Pascal
|
| I don't want to listen to a rambling, un-edited conversation
| that _might_ be good and /or interesting, I want to listen to a
| well thought-out talk that _is_ good and interesting, and is
| only exactly as long as it needs to be.
|
| Edited and/or curated podcasts (or videos) are simply a better
| avenue for that.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| For me, Clubhouse went from an exclusive party of real-name
| people I wanted to meet to an open party with lots of
| pseudonymous/anonymous accounts.
|
| Especially on a live social audio platform, which requires so
| much of my attention, I wanted to know who I was talking to and
| be excited to meet them, and that became harder and harder.
| macspoofing wrote:
| Maybe it's dead in the way Vine (Twitter) was, until TikTok came
| in and took over the social media space. There is a use-case for
| social audio but it may need some refinement.
| [deleted]
| rvz wrote:
| Yes.
|
| I'm still struggling for anyone to give me a concrete answer as
| to why Clubhouse is worth $4B or even $1B at the time. [0]
| Monetisation-wise, Clubhouse looks like a solution, looking for a
| problem via hair-splitting a niche which already has been solved
| 'generally' by everyone else.
|
| It is not early days and Clubhouse looks like it is going to
| either shutdown or get acquired in the next 5 years.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883362
| jononomo wrote:
| I like Callin -- I listen to Wes Yang and Jesse Singal on there.
| It seems like every show has a technical glitch or a user who
| doesn't understand muting/unmuting, but overall I like it.
| rg111 wrote:
| Social audio is not dead. It existed for decades, and it was
| known as... conference call.
|
| Before internet, we used conference calls in our friends circle
| and among relatives, a lot.
|
| Now we do a group call in Meet or Telegram.
|
| And Discord has a lot of very active social voice in many
| channels.
|
| Data is so cheap in so many places, people often just opt for
| video. But what many people still prefer is just audio calls.
|
| Social audio is not dead. What is dead is Clubhouse who were
| stupid enough to believe that hype alone could cause growth and
| made normies beg or pay for invites. And who only released an app
| for a platform that is practically non-existent outside oof the
| US and the EU.
| zbuf wrote:
| Most of Clubhouse was a vacuum of hot garbage, but this medium
| _can_ be great.
|
| It was interesting to experience a really great example of social
| audio -- as a guest on a "show" for blind and low vision
| podcasters. The perfect use of the perfect medium, I think.
|
| The differentiator was the work and preparation done by the host.
| But that doesn't make this a completely new medium -- all of the
| traditional elements of a live radio programme were there; a
| great host (who keeps things moving), organised guests in
| advance, and a community with Q&As from the audience members.
|
| What was new was the tooling, and the ability for such an
| extensive show to be made in software and operated by one person
| (and a blind one at that).
|
| https://the-blind-podmaker.pinecast.co/episode/df71fa32/blin...
| outsidetheparty wrote:
| One overvalued flash in the pan does not constitute a trend.
| marban wrote:
| - Instant uninterestingness
|
| - No slot machine psychology and adhocracy
|
| - Low information density inflates usage time
|
| - Vanity barrier between speakers and listeners
|
| - No evergreen content / Indexability
| rco8786 wrote:
| The problem, IMO, is the "live" nature of things like
| Clubhouse/Spaces. Your audience has to be actively engaged _at
| the right moment_ to get distribution, and even then you're
| subject to the randomness that is live content. No ability to
| edit the boring parts out or add production value.
|
| Something that is like Twitter for Podcasts would be interesting
| I think. 1-5 minute audio clips designed to be consumed
| asynchronously, presented in a sort of timeline manner where you
| could feasibly just hit play and listen for 30m, getting quick
| hit audio content from 5-10 creators
|
| Imagine informative YouTube videos but without the "what's up
| guys in this video we're ...blah blah" sort of fluff. Just
| straight to the point.
| bilekas wrote:
| "A quick message from our sponsor before we get to the video -
| RAID shadow legends!"
| 0des wrote:
| Do you cry sometimes? Borrow checker got you down? Try
| BetterHelp!
| vyrotek wrote:
| If you mix the creators into a single timeline that sorts of
| turns it into a voice-only TikTok.
|
| I've been toying with an idea that's more of an async version
| of the Marco Polo app but for podcast-type content. Async bites
| of a single podcast episode which may involve one or more
| contributors continuously adding to the episode/discussion.
|
| Does anything like either of these exist already?
| emptyfile wrote:
| Fascinating.
|
| I read the entire article without learning what social audio or
| Clubhouse are.
| dan1234 wrote:
| I would say it's probably closest to a 'live podcast'.
| dsr_ wrote:
| So... unscheduled radio talk show?
|
| The obvious competitors are:
|
| - scheduled radio talk show. They may be inane but they're
| professional and consistent
|
| - recorded podcast: has the major advantages of being
| listenable on your own schedule and possibly well-edited
|
| - youtube: same as podcast, but with video as well
|
| - youtube live: the chat allows more people to participate
| simultaneously than folks trying to get airtime
|
| - discord: it's live and you might even know or get to know
| all the participants
|
| That's a lot of competition and not much in visible
| advantages
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Is social audio already dead?_
|
| The general rule of thumb, is that any headline that ends in a
| question mark is answered by "no," but I think that this one is
| "yes."
|
| Clubhouse, Marco Polo, etc. have not been very compelling; for
| different reasons. I think Clubhouse couldn't compete with video
| broadcast media, like TikTok, and Marco Polo also couldn't, but
| because it is one-to-one, without social "scoring."
|
| Also, the Clubhouse app wasn't very good, and was iOS-only. I
| think that it's a good example of one that should probably have
| been done via a hybrid system.
|
| I think that, if we will release a native platform app, it needs
| to be absolutely top-Quality. No compromises. That's the case for
| the app I'm writing now.
| martin_a wrote:
| > and was iOS-only.
|
| I think that was a feature not a bug. Strengthened the FOMO.
| tjoff wrote:
| For it to be dead, must it not have been alive first?
|
| From my perspective it clearly was not.
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