This seems like an ok time to point to Shaan's twitter thread on why he believes clubhouse will fail [1]. Nothing is guaranteed of course, but it is an entertaining read. It's designed to be a bit over the top, silicon valley esque story style. But the person who wrote it, is writing from their experience of actually launching, and burning out in an attempt to build a similar company which makes the thread that much more interesting.
In any case, it surprises me that Clubhouse is staying in closed mode for so long knowing that the bigger social networks are coming for them, especially Twitter which is where I see the most number of people talking about Clubhouse.
I think Clubhouse is making a big mistake if they don't sell out to a bigger player. It's like the Steve Jobs quote to Dropbox about how what they have is a feature, not a product. What Clubhouse offers should be built into a broader social network since it clearly can't survive on independently for the reasons Shaan mentions.
Discord is already launching "Stages" which aims to replicate Clubhouse's main selling point. And I'm sure Twitter, Facebook, and Microsoft are gunning for them too. I have trouble seeing how they survive.
Except Dropbox succeeded as a separate company by most reasonable metrics.
The Jobs offer was $1B IIRC; they’ve got a $12B market cap and some reasonable ROI far beyond the acquisition offer by now (remember even the IPO investors - non-retail - bought in at $21).
Whether the total ROI exceeds the growth / rate of return in AAPL stock during that time, well, maybe not? But it would have been a cash transaction...
Jobs offered to buy them in 2009 when AAPL stock was around $5 a share (obviously a lot of splits happened), compared to today's price of over $120 so that $1B in stock would be around $25B, more than double Dropbox market cap
But like I said, it would have almost certainly been a cash transaction, right? So yeah, engineers who were retained would have done better with their AAPL stock grants, but that’s not really the measure to compare is it?
By that logic most companies should have dissolved and simply bought AAPL shares with their proceeds (I mean that’s true up to some limit but it falls apart in some macroeconomic sense obviously).
Couldn't agree more. Not only is it a feature, not a product, but it's a niche feature at that. The vast majority of people I know who have used Clubhouse find it fascinating at first and then within a day or two realize it's mostly boring content and never touch it again.
CH gathers users' contacts lists probably in an attempt to increase its valuation in the market. If you can clone CH but don't have the same data about users, it makes sense to just buy CH.
I don't like CH because I don't like anything that only caters to "elites" and select groups. IMO, that goes against the very purpose of the Internet.
Closed mode is the reason it was so hyped over last months. Arguably the ONLY reason, but that's debatable. I'm pretty sure that multiuser audio only applications weren't invented in 2020.
> When a user opens an app (IG, youtube, TikTok) they need juicy content within 7 seconds (or they bounce). This is the "Interesting-ness" problem.
> Those other apps (IG, Tiktok etc.) have millions of pieces of content to choose from. So their algorithms get really really good at finding juicy content for you right away. But clubhouse is LIVE. So you need something INTERESTING that's ALSO happening RIGHT NOW.
> multiplying "content is interesting" and "content is live" doesn't just make the problem 2x harder..it makes it 200x harder.
The interesting thing is that Twitter Spaces solves all of this organically. No interesting Space content? Well, you were already there to scroll through your feed, so you can get your dopamine hit just by doing that anyways. Notifications can take advantage of your entire interest graph, not just your contact list and Clubhouse-specific opt-ins.
I've spent significant time in Twitter Spaces. The UX is practically identical. Panel discussions are equally professional. There's naturally going to be more professional content because people can justify spending time to build a Twitter following WAY more than they can justify spending time to build a Clubhouse following. When Twitter launched Fleets I thought it was a massive waste of screen real estate having them as a position:sticky-esque element, but Spaces live there as well, and it flips the equation on its head: you want to stay up-to-date with the spaces that are going on at any time, so it makes total sense for spaces to be top-of-screen and top-of-mind.
And while there may be some who are afraid of linking their Twitter presence to the frank thoughts they might want to share... Clubhouse IMO is even worse on this, because the insistence on real identities prevents an entire class of pseudonymous discussion from happening, and it's only a place people can feel safe to say controversial things while it's a relatively small invite-only community, which works counter to the growth trend. Not to mention opening to pseudonymous accounts enables voice-only acting as fictional characters, which will democratize the Virtual Youtuber trend in a huge way.
Assuming Twitter can stick to an April release, I fear Clubhouse will be spoken of with the same historical reverence we use for Digg, and the same meteoric two-year lifespan of Pets.com.
I too am interested in Twitter's April launch. It feels like a lot of clubhouse buzz is centered around twitter. Maybe it's twitter's turn to find success in integrating another company's idea into their product
I think that it's closed so that you are forced to receive an invitation to join, and to send an invitation you have to give the app access to your phone's contacts (at least on iOS when I looked at it, quickly uninstalled). There were a number of dark patterns utilized to try and get elevated permissions and access to contacts.
The exact opposite for me. Their points are interesting, but to me the format just felt like a very poor attempt at creative writing. The first ~10 tweets convey absolutely no useful information. They only "set the scene".
I can see how others do find it entertaining though.
Or maybe they just find Clubhouse ridiculous and are tired of hearing about it? The tweet is amusing if nothing else, I wouldn't suspect the people liking it are jealous of anything.
Technically speaking it's difficult to see if the label 'clone' is justified given that the concept of audio only chat rooms isn't exactly new.
The biggest clubhouse 'innovation' might have been to make it an invite only app and thus create a cascade of FOMO in the style of Gibson's 'antimarketing' in Zero History where someone creates the world's most sought after jeans by simply not selling it anywhere.
Yep, lots of the rooms I see are like "So U can give ORAL w/o a condom, but have sex with one" (actual room, actual spelling) which had almost 1k people in it..
Facebook was invite only in the first days. So was gmail and most of other "high in demand but not yet ready" apps.
So being invite only isn't bad in the first days. But if it can't serve its popularity within a reasonable time frame, someone else will take their market, no surprise there.
Reminds me of Orkut which remained invite only as a policy for most of its life span.
LiveJournal was invite-only for a number of years before Gmail existed for this exact reason - it was growing faster than the server architecture could handle. I wonder if Gmail got the idea from LiveJournal.
I'm working on Jam which is an open source implementation of the drop-in audio room format, in many ways similar to Clubhouse or Twitter Spaces but also different (and more versatile).
That tweet captures why I began building async audio-chat in a slack-like app last year: https://heysync.chat
It's very exciting to see that they finally 'get it' too -- that feeling, that this is something discovered more than invented, is exactly what drove my initial interest in the idea.
My impression is that Clubhouse makes people feel like they're part of a special privileged group by artifically and arbitrarily restricting access to a small number of dedicated (if not outright sycophantic) listeners.
It's ultimately a system which benefits highly privileged people who have a lot of free time and flexibility while excluding people with more restrictive schedules.
Digital media can be consumed at any time and in any way you chose, while this seems like it's reverting to the terrible legacy model.
The true master grifter has this outstanding ability to transform the simplest of ideas from a 2 minute explanation into a 20 minute diatribe. One must really love the sound of their own voice in order to spend so much time yaking on endlessly without saying anything of substance.
There are the Ivory Tower types, and they can be annoying. There is a lot of genuine.
I rose to decent popularity and was hooked initially. I never quiet understood wanting to be the listener or how that experience is sustainable. I guess I gained followers bc I spoke in convos that were relevant to my interests & I was speaking quite a bit. I've since lost a ton of interest in the app and hop in here and there. The convos don't seem to be developing. I neither want to speak or listen any longer.
Let me play devil’s advocate here: maybe Clubhouse mirrors real life in that if your friends are all getting together for happy hour at 4:30pm ok a Friday because they work jobs that let them do that or don’t work at all while you took away at your startup, you can’t make this real time event. I have learned over the past several years that making it to a real time event that isn’t recorded does make it significantly more special and memorable. Not every moment is worth having but the impact of it only happening once makes it more memorable.
Having said that, I’m not a user of Clubhouse and have no intention of using it. Discord and Zoom have been plenty good for this kind of communication without any influencers or marketers being involved.
Not mentioned by the OP but Telegram also released an update last week to its group voice call feature, which essentially turns a channel or group into a ClubHouse room. https://telegram.org/blog/voice-chats-on-steroids
Discord joined the party as well and just rolled out Stages which is basically the same thing as Clubhouse. That’s going to be super useful for us though as we quite often present to our largish community so having better moderation control is going to help out a lot. I also think having this at the community level is going to be far better than being thought lead at by people who love the sound of their own voices.
It definitely seems to be. I just opened the app right now and the room titles I see are:
"Breakfast w/ Champions the Millionaire's Breakfast Club"
"Money vs Passion: Big Entrepreneurs Open Up"
"Welcome to Clubhouse! Get +1000 followers, likes, and comments"
"NFTs for Dummies"
"SuperDuper Coin takes over CRYPTO!! Less than $0.01!"
"Big Instagram Room: Marketing 101"
"Rising Affirmations"
"NFTs tips 2 Month Anniversary get your POAP"
"Marketing and Selling NFTs"
"BOSS MOMS: Branding Like a Boss"
"DAILY WORKSHOP: Reclaim your passion"
That's just a snippet, surprised to not see more around NFTs, and you can imagine there's rocket and star emojis strewn throughout all those titles. I basically stopped logging into clubhouse. There are some good conversations here and there in my areas of interest (none of the above) but even in those people are just preening to get "on stage" and when they talk say nothing of substance "let's take a step back here and think about X" or "where do we draw the line?" seem to be the go-to phrases of someone who has nothing tangible to say about the topic.
I would welcome a Clubhouse type startup with actually vetted people that eschewed topics/influencers or which didn't attempt to expand. Like, cap Clubhouse new members 6 months ago and that would have been an amazing app with lots of interesting and successful people talking about interesting topics without all the noise.
Far more useless apps have reached far higher heights. In the end, growthies cater primarily to future investors and that means growth, spectacle, FOMO and dark patterns are prioritized over usefulness and innovation.
Can you give an example of something more useless than Clubhouse? I can't really think of anything less useful than listening to a bunch of people self-promote in real-time audio.
Brevity was what originally made Twitter popular after the first wave of blogging. I don't think the vogue for blowhards talking at length in 'rooms' is going to last long, whether within Clubhouse or any of the other me-too cloned feature additions in other social media platforms.
All of the bloviating reminded me of business school classes. You want to go there to learn, but there’s a few people who just want to hear themselves talk who end up wasting your time.
I ve seen a few videos on youtube recorded from clubhouse. It seems like a group recording app, but is that unique? Few people can arrange engaging conversations anyway so whether they record it in clubhouse, on zoom or in their mom's tape recorded makes zero difference.
I am not even sure if Clubhouse has network effect in that stickiness of app isn't the number of people using it but the quality of the content. In this case, the audio rooms. As far as I can tell, 90% of rooms I see just aren't that good. I wouldn't go back to use an app just because Lebron James uses it if I don't get any value from it.
Yes, and for the "celeb" talks like that time Elon Musk was on, it was on YouTube 5min after. So why should I download an app and be there at that exact time (which would have been in the middle of the night for me) when I can just listen to the thing on YouTube later at my own convenience?
You could make this exact argument with Twitch streams yet it is extremely popular. I do believe watching/listening to it live with others does add to the experience. Also AFAIK there is a chance for the audience to actually join in on some of the conversations.
I don't watch Twitch or other live streams often, but my understanding is that:
1) It's a lot more interactive, and
2) A lot of streamers stream multiple hours each day, and it's a completely different form of media than Clubhouse, since streamers usually play a game, which in itself is much more interesting than listening to two dudes talk for 5 hours.
This. If I can only listen in all the interesting rooms, why does it matter that I listen "live". If there were features that somehow allowed for controlled interaction, there would be more of an appeal.
I have never been on Clubhouse, because I don't own an Iphone. but I have listened to every one of the Clubhouse townhalls hosted by Paul Davison.
He realizes that his app is only as good as the people who are on it, whether those people came on as a part of his brilliant app design or as a coincidence of the pandemic.
In other words, he has Network Effects. Capitalized merely for effects.
I always preferred the well-produced podcasts where a week is spent to make an hour of content (like those made by Gimlet, Radiotopia) over the ones that just throw some people into a microphone to ramble for a few hours. It seems like Clubhouse is that latter sort, turned up to 11. But those were the most successful podcasts anyway (eg. Rogan), so Clubhouse will probably take over the world.
On the other hand, while there are a lot of "influencer" rooms, there have been a lot of rooms where discussions I don't see going on anywhere else are happening.
I'm specifically talking about politics, things like CRT (critical race theory) and it's march through schools, business, and politics. As well as other controversial subjects.
At times they get heated but for the most part people are generally civil and the discussions can be enlightening.
Yep, where the medium shines is with controversy. Live audio is simultaneously more humanizing, and less efficient, than text or pre-recorded social media. That tradeoff seems well worth it to me.
Even so, a lot of discussions still demand good/strict moderation.
And all the other growth hacking and flirting stuff is pretty cringey.
> I'm specifically talking about politics, things like CRT (critical race theory) and it's march through schools, business, and politics.
This sounds like every right wing subreddit and youtube channel in existence. I don't think any of those have hit critical mass, definitely nowhere near something to justify Clubhouse's valuation.
That’s good to know, maybe I should check out some of the less popular rooms. Similarly, it would be unfair to judge all of Reddit based on their default subreddits.
Mumble's been available on Android and iOS for years. These upstarts don't all have network effects going for them. Traditionally, conference calls were something we all avoided.
Despite these things, and contrary to my expectations, these voice chats are popular. Recording quality beats a POTS line, but that's the only upside. Maybe it makes everybody feel like they're in their own podcast (their own "pod" as the kids say).
I guess this is the 21st century's version of IRC for casual, low-overhead chat. Nothing simple is ever good enough for non-enthusiasts.
Exactly, I was wondering why free conference.com which has been around for years, or something like it, couldn't just whitelabel itself and boom, a million easy competitors.
I think Clubhouse started well but it really feels like is going downhill quickly. A16 is pushing its adoption hard (vested interest).
It's just so spammy and when I scroll through conversation it is incredibly tough to figure out where quality resides. That whole growth at all costs mantra --> As we descend down the quality chart to large scale adoption I am not really excited to see where it evolves to.
The most praised and hyped aspects ("novel"/nice community, opportunities to listen to certain celebrities) were never anything inherent to Clubhouse. They were side effects of clubhouse being gated and hip among a certain crowd at the same time. Clubhouse fans can talk about their cool encounters on there all they want, it isn't something that was ever going to last more than a few weeks/months.
Agreed - it was a good marketing play to get people on board. I am really not sure where it goes from here, and then when they need to monetize after they hit their growth it will be full of advertisements.
Invite only and still no Android app and valued at $1B? Complete horsesh*t from the VC hype machine. (and they know it.)
Now the clones / competitors are here with the same features and have their existing Android audience, Clubhouse probably needs to reassess on why they still exist. (a16z still hyping it through forced notifications)
Sounds like this train is already low on hype.
Downvoters: Ready to explain? Alright, So as I said months ago [0][1][2] "With Twitter and Facebook feature clones coming along, We'll see how Clubhouse fights for survival whilst being 'copied to death'." Today, the clones have already caught up, and 1 month later, Clubhouse STILL has no Android app.
And now you get this from LinkedIn [3]. So, how is this valuation justified as I have already asked months ago? [4]
As the competitors close in, the best time for Clubhouse to announce their Android app should be today. Why have they been unable to release it?
Clubhouse is going down the exact same route that Quora did. Initially, they seeded the platform with a sense of exclusivity and big name users, but it is rapidly suffering the effect of what happens to any platform as it goes broad and average quality of user goes down.
Because people enjoy talking and listening to people talk. Especially when it involves topics they are interested in, or people they are interested in. It is sort of a cross between talk radio and ham radio.
I thought Clubhouse clones referred to voice-only deep fakes that let one pretend they are in a room when they are not. This would be funny and interesting. It is sorely needed for video business meetings at least.
But no, "Clubhouse clones" refer to copycat apps of Clubhouse. What is even the point of this. We need more silence, not more occasions to let noise distract us.
I think you have that backwards. Wikipedia is random access to information. Clubhouse is serialized access to random signal that may or may not contain information at the time you access it.
Wouldn't Quora or Reddit cover this 'need' but with the additional convenience of recorded/written word, so you don't have to be there and then to capture this random information?
I understand to drop in to listen (for example) an AMA by Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, someone... but to be on a chatroom with 1000 people talking about sex.. I find it kinda unhelpful.
Same. I think most people on Clubhouse just rambles for minutes.
I don't think audience participation in a talk has much value. But when you remove audience participation, Clubhouse is just basically a podcast that is not recorded.
True, Clubhouse fame was very much due to a media hype, An important lesson to learn though. It doesn't matter if you are a late arriver, or your product is so so. If you manage to hit the popular culture hype waves you get traction from the popular media. That said, the hype around Clubhouse is allready in decline. Another lesson learned. A hit doesn't necessarily stick and can be over as fast as it started while the party moves on to the next hype.
I used to love clubhouse earlier when it had some really great SV tech chats. Then I started listening to some of the other less popular rooms. There are more and more BS charlatans talking about making wealth. Then I listened to this disturbing room where racist flat-earthers were chatting about how Elon Musk was the anti-christ and he was injecting himself with the blood of minorities. The conversation was so disturbing that I haven't used the app since.
In any case, it surprises me that Clubhouse is staying in closed mode for so long knowing that the bigger social networks are coming for them, especially Twitter which is where I see the most number of people talking about Clubhouse.
[1] https://twitter.com/ShaanVP/status/1371972261004070913