> 100% of the payment will go to the creator ... Clubhouse will take nothing.
Well imagine if they had an Android app in the first place or earlier right before all the big players started copying them, then it would have been attractive to the users. Right now, what is the point if the invite system is still there.
Another platform can just announce the same thing and they are back to square zero.
> We are excited to see how people use it, and to continue working hard to help the amazing members of the Clubhouse community grow and thrive.
Yet, with no Android app and an increasing amount of competitors copying the hell out of Clubhouse, I can only see this going in the way of Meerkat, Yik Yak and Periscope. (By being shut down)
> Yet, with no Android app and an increasing amount of competitors copying the hell out of Clubhouse, I can only see this going in the way of Meerkat, Yik Yak and Periscope. (By being shut down)
We'll of course have to wait and see, but I don't imagine that Clubhouse will be entirely displaced. What's unique about Clubhouse is not the concept of a Clubhouse room itself, which is essentially a Discord channel with basic moderation capabilities, but the community it has created. For the moment at least, Clubhouse is chock full of cool and influential people.
Clubhouse rooms range from typical seminars, to loosely moderated discussions, to essentially chat rooms. The cool thing is you run into people who have interesting stories and lives. For instance, attending a seminar on nuclear disarmament with New York Times reporters, public policymakers, and whatever random influential people show up to pop up on stage. Or attending a discussion on Tibet where Ai Wei Wei, Tibetan monks, and other dissidents pop in.
Another interesting product of Clubhouse is that it's opened a large forum for Chinese-language public discussion. Clubhouse is one of the very few online places I've seen people willing to speak frankly on sensitive political issues in Chinese, perhaps because Clubhouse rooms are (at least nominally) ephemeral, leaving no record. Even though Clubhouse is now blocked in China, a lot of this discussion is continuing, with voices on all sides of the political spectrum.
The (possible) irony is that ClubHouse uses Agora behind the scenes to power its real-time audio. that’s a Chinese company based in Mainland China. I’d be careful if I was them. The double irony is that I believe Agora is blocked behind TGF.
Excellent point. There are apparently already Clubhouse bots as well, and it would be trivial to record audio using one (although you'd need a bot per room you want to record). It's probably very difficult to recognize Clubhouse bots as well, since you probably don't need that many of them, at least with Clubhouse's current scale, to record all the interesting big political discussions.
Will they be responsible enough to care about it before it becomes a problem? Proactive infrastructure upgrades are not a strong suit of most "hip" startups.
As a former Quora Top Writer (2013 and 2014), that makes a lot of sense to me. And faster, I'd bet.
What made Quora special in the early days was the high-quality community. Smart questions, smart writers answering them, even a reasonable proportion of smart comments. That seems to be the same sort of magic that Clubhouse has managed. It's not the technology, it's the community.
But as Quora tried to scale, that got worse and worse. It wasn't a small set of staff doing moderation, but a wider group of volunteers. The average quality of the questions declined. Comments became more tiresome. A lot of people started writing answers not for the joy of it, but because Quora's larger platform provided them with a means to some personal end. Comments became more tiresome. Indeed, now one of the first search results I get for "Quora" now is an article titled "How to use Quora to power up your lead generation." Ugh.
I'll be really surprised if Clubhouse manages to avoid a similar fate. There's a very low barrier to entry.
But "lead generation" is the fate of all social networks. It may be cool at the beginning, but very soon marketers will figure out how to use it for commercial purposes, and this will become 90% of the use. It is the same story on Facebook, Pinterest, and so many others.
I don't have/don't want a Clubhouse account (it seems like a very cringe-inducing platform for people past their prime), but I actually think you're wrong.
Quora lends itself toward SEO spam. It's written word. Clubhouse currently isn't archived in a machine-readable format. This eliminates a decent 60% of the value for commercial purposes, and probably 30% will be taken care of by users having the common sense to avoid any overwhelmingly-obvious marketing.
Of course, it already is seemingly just a platform for aging capitalists and twitter users to "have discussions," which seems like shorthand for "advertise themselves." I couldn't call it good by any means. But that's more or less what every social media platform is, and not different than what you'd find anywhere else.
However, it seems unlikely it'll get much worse from here.
I'm not saying that SEO spam will be clubhouse's problem. But there are more kinds of marketing than SEO. The "investment seminar" scam, for example, has been running for decades in the real world.
I also think it's a mistake to think that common sense will save us. Everybody has weaknesses, and any given scam is carefully optimized for its target audience.
Any platform that 'recommends' content on the basis of user behaviour is going to incentivize spam. Clubhouse is new so maybe that's not there yet. The spammers will only open the floodgates once the audience is big enough.
This is my feeling as well; Quora had the same feel when it was launched and now it's basically worthless with people only posting to promote their product/business.
I've found Quora pretty active, but I just use it to offhandedly ask dumb questions like "if Easter is so good why isn't there a Wester" whenever I think of them.
Half the time the answers are actually very educational and the other half it's a Facebook-style reply where an old person yells at me because they misread the question.
The one exploitative thing I've noticed is there's a "partner program" that pays you to ask questions, but it seems impossible to make more than 10c off it in a lifetime.
There are cool and influential people on Clubhouse, for sure. I listened to and participated in very interesting conversations. The vast majority of Clubhouse though is shady NFT talks, literally blind dating, and shameless self promotion by countless “coaches”, “facilitators”, and “DJs”. I do not have a good feeling about it.
> For the moment at least, Clubhouse is chock full of cool and influential people.
There's a fundamental tension here. Cool and influential people want to hang out with other cool and influential people. Non-cool and non-influential people also want to hang out with cool and influential people. When you use your exclusivity to build popularity there's only one way it can play out. You can do it as slowly as possible or all in one big bang but it will happen.
> Clubhouse is one of the very few online places I've seen people willing to speak frankly on sensitive political issues in Chinese
This is more an effect of you being exposed to Chinese people rather than some new phenomenon. Mainland politics is everywhere online, it's in the digital spaces that Westerners rarely visit though.
Probably the biggest platform out there. You can argue it's censored but then again the same arguments could be made about plenty of Western platforms who follow the moral mores of 2021. There's a lot of leetspeak to get around filters when talking about sensitive topics, translations aren't always great but if you find something particularly out of place maybe try checking for alt meanings.
There's >300 million active monthly users. Plenty of things you won't like in there.
Traditional type forum, mainly older people, certainly more patriotic.
If you want to only read opinions you are more amenable to and won't accuse of being bots/cybertroopers I'd suggest the forums that foreign mainlanders often use. Around East Asia and the bamboo network there's few popular places:
What's the best way to keep up with modern Chinese culture for someone in the Anglosphere? Is Avocado Toast a big thing among millennials in China? Is there (was there) any Hipster movement in China? To what extent does Western culture penetrate China and what are the latest fads or fashions?
Maybe you could watch their TV and movies? I've lived outside my country of birth for most of my life, so that's how I learned about American culture before moving there.
Of course after arriving, I realized that a lot of what I saw is either aspirational or realistic only for a very small cross-section of American people.
I’ve found the total opposite. Most things I’ve listened to have eventually turned into a sales pitch. It’s almost like clubhouse is infomercials with listeners calling in.
And then there’s the avalanche of notification spam..,
> Clubhouse is one of the very few online places I've seen people willing to speak frankly on sensitive political issues in Chinese, perhaps because Clubhouse rooms are (at least nominally) ephemeral, leaving no record.
I don't think that's a reasonable assumption since the invention of screen recorders, especially combined with Clubhouse's "real name" and a "real face" policy (I'm not sure if the latter is official policy or just a community convention, I'd be more worried about the former)
Speaking of community and having 'influencers' on it, I would bet it takes more the route of Quora which once upon a time you could say similar things. But it's a complete shit hole now.
You can create an account even without an invite. If you give it access to your contacts, your friends will get a notification to invite you, if they have an invite to give. Once you get an invite, your account will be activated, and you can use Clubhouse.
This is how I got in, through a friend I hadn't talked to in a while.
Giants can clone the entire product with a small team.
I'm worried about this exact problem.
Edit: First thought that comes to mind is filing a few patents and then throwing 50% of funding into a lawsuit against the first giant to clone you.
This is traditionally not the way, but with the incumbents so nimble and readily able to pick off good ideas, it seems like it might be the only defense.
Giants will clone and make a piece of shit. Apps like this survive by creating a network of people. They do that by creating demand to join the service. How do you do that? Make it invite only, and invite a ton of high profile people and get them using and talking about it, creating FOMO.
The only people who threaten this are Facebook and Twitter. Twitter _actually_ could clone it or buy a competitor. But, look at Twitter’s history of that. They literally KILLED a TikTok by buying it and shutting it down. They are in the process of killing a live video competitor to twitch and youtube called periscope.
What did Snapchat pivot to? The only pivot I know they did was changing from disappearing messages to stories (not sure if the disappearing messages are still there?). But this wasn't exactly a pivot as far as I know because of FB copying the stories feature afterwards.
my intuition on FB agrees with you but I can’t think of something like clubhouse that they didn’t buy or attempt to? any particular ships you’re referring to?
the ones you’re referring to were social photo/video plays which FB was perfectly setup to enter. FB doesn’t have an audio product as far as i know.
What would they patent exactly? Group voice chat? I imagine someone patented that decades ago and if anything, Clubhouse will be licensing or fighting patent trolls soon if they aren't already.
People forget that Instagram was iOS-only for quite a while before an Android version was available.
I’ve been on Clubhouse for over two months now; it’s very polished for a beta app and the community it has attracted is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced and I’ve been online since the BBS days of the 80s and everything since then.
The $100 million they raised from a16z gives them the runway to do things right. I see the copies shutting down before in their attempts to displace Clubhouse.
Instagram was a much more niche app back when it was iOS-only, and it didn't have the likes of FB, Twitter and Microsoft racing to copy all of its features.
Yeah I don’t understand their business model, there is a cost to process a payment so even if I give someone $100 the credit card company and payment processors will take a cut.
Now there is a difference between a platform that takes 15-30% cut and <5% but I really don’t see how they’ll be able to operate.
And this ofc goes beyond the fact as you mentioned that the big players can simply kill this by having a similar policy especially for smaller creators.
The only purpose of clubhouse that I can think off is if that’s exactly their plan in the first place.
The only other thing I can think off is if they’ll offer a content discovery platform and then charge creators to promote their content on the system but that’s arguably a worse off deal for creators since they’ll have to put in money upfront without any guarantee of returns.
> 100% of the payment will go to the creator. The person sending the money will also be charged a small card processing fee, which will go directly to our payment processing partner, Stripe. Clubhouse will take nothing.
It's still a risky business model, since in certain fraud cases it will be left holding the bag for chargebacks if it has released the money to a fraudster but they don't have a revenue stream proportional to the payment amount to cover whatever percentage of the transactions are fraudulent.
Not sure why you're down voted. People that steal credit cards find ways to fund money from those cards to themselves. Fake apps are one way this can happen. When a company sets up a model where anyone could easily become a receiver of money and anyone could easily pay, they get into the AML world.
> When a company sets up a model where anyone could easily become a receiver of money and anyone could easily pay, they get into the AML world.
Yeah, it’s interesting how very few people know about the ways payment frauds take place.
An analogy I can think of is highways. A non trivial number of vehicles plying them are carrying illegal goods. Payments is similar, when you set up a path for money to flow between A and B the very first users to adopt that path are money launderers.
He's suggesting two people can pay each other and get a ton of credit card points off it. This happens anytime you can refill something with 100% of the value you charged to a CC. I've noticed this with Ko-fi too.
It's more like a live podcasting platform. I joined and gave it an honest shot, but I just don't have time to sit and listen to people ramble. The 1-2 hours per day I do have need to be spent listening to something purposeful and produced, like an actual podcast or audiobook.
I also think CH is very limited in the content it provides. At least that's my estimation after using the app for a few months. Either the algorithm is failing at showing me content I care about, or the platform is failing at attracting content I care about. Either way, the people I follow don't produce content, and I don't produce content, so the content I receive is mostly horrendous garbage.
Having said that, I could see content selection improving once CH finally gives up the invite gimmick. Something like a moderated panel of experts talking live with audience participation _sounds_ interesting, but the experts have to be experts and they have to interesting. How people can listen to celebrities or random nobodies ramble for hours on end about nothing is beyond me, but that's like 99% of the content I see currently on CH.
I think the “live podcasting” is a post-hoc rationalisation. In my experience it’s much closer to a conference call than a podcast.
Specifically, lack of script, lack of direction, low audio quality, “am I muted?”, and people talking over each other.
Twitter in the early days was known for celebrities turning up and replying to or even following non-celebrities. Then Quora was known for this. Both outgrew this quickly - celebrities may still do these things, but proportionally less so and it’s not the draw to the platform.
I think Clubhouse needs to figure out what it’s draw is after this phase because right now it’s just a conference call with a celebrity.
Clubhouse's advantage over Twitter is that it's not recorded and you can't get reply guys. I know minor bluechecks on Twitter who are pretty annoyed by the platform because someone always yells at them or quotes them a month later no matter what they say. It's nice to have things disappear.
…It's really not fun to listen to, though, it is just a WebEx meeting with even worse audio.
As much as I think that sort of moderation is great to have, I wonder how much it will limit their growth (which might be ok).
It's also a balance because if there is no interaction, if it's really not a chat room and is just a live show then I'd much rather just listen to a podcast on my time, at my convenience, with better audio quality and "is my mic on" edited out.
It really is strange, I can only credit its success so far to the fact that it's tapping into people's primal urge to be able to literally shout down the opposition instead of just metaphorically shout them down. I don't know why anyone would find the format of being forced to debate on the spot better than having the time to construct posts at your leisure. Every clip or story I've heard/seen come out of the app has been a completely mess.
It's very early success (first 6 months) was because of VC hype [1]. You couldn't go anywhere online without hearing how Clubhouse is the next big SV social media bet. I'm guessing a lot of that hype has died down as users find out the app really isn't that useful.
That's because VCs got to use it, and nobody has a larger ego or desire for other people to hear them talk than a VC who's just been paid a lot to spend other people's money.
Discord took the concept of "voice-only" communication software and extended it to a full integrated solution.
This is just, yet another "voice-only" communication app, except it's iOS exclusive, invite only and seems to focus on features that definitely have no place in a "developing" platform.
I've been using it as a language learning app. I just join some channels in my target language and listen to various people's voices and accents and try to understand them. Every once in a while if I'm feeling brave I'll raise my hand and utter a couple of sentences. The topics are simple and often very repetitive, which makes it well suited for practicing languages.
The "regular" channels didn't feel very valuable to me after a week of use or so, and a lot of them seemed exclusively made for the purpose of gaining more followers (either on CH, IG or Twitter, etc.).
I see this misconception a lot when new startups start to gain momentum, the idea that it only makes sense for completely novel concepts to take off.
Clubhouse fills a specific niche that doesn't have a strong incumbent yet. It's essentially live podcasts/fireside chats where listeners can chime in.
As of right now, there are big players in podcast platforms and conference calls for work, but none whose platform is specifically built around the live podcast with interactivity from listeners option.
Successful companies aren't built around making something totally novel that's never been done before, this isn't the Nobel Prize. They're built out of creating the best and stickiest product/service for a use case that doesn't have one yet.
Indeed. Except, the value add is that anyone can run their own password-protected radio show, and the hope is "anyone" includes a lot of popular people.
It's audio snapchat, which everyone wants to join because all the cool people are also on it.
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. The main success factor for Clubhouse is the social graph. It is entirely possible to have access to people like Paris Hilton, Anthony Scaramucci, or MC Hammer among other notable people.
I can’t be connected to these people because I live in Europe and so times when I can reasonably be on a phone call do not overlap with theirs.
Twitter on the other hand... I can be connected with these people and not only can I “catch up” later, but reading Twitter in bed is more socially acceptable than being on a conference call.
It’s strange to me that both you and I are getting downvoted… probably from people who haven’t actually used it? If you do, then it’s obvious how it’s not a conference call at all. It’s a panel that you might be able to participate in, which isn’t the same thing at all. Anyone can talk whenever they want on a conference call. The moderator chooses who talks in clubhouse.
Conference calls have had guest management and moderation features for decades. Also several dozen social platforms already support livestreams with more functionality like video, files, chat, etc.
Conference calls also have hosts who can mute and manage the guests. We had conferencing 2.0 about 5 years ago with the likes of Uberconference, and now 3.0 with Zoom. What is actually new?
It’s a panel discussion, with an optional mic that can be explicitly passed around. There are bios on everyone that you can click around, no video, many rooms you can join arranged by subject matter and people, and a social network that includes many A-listers. The entire premise is different than a conference call. I don’t know what else to say… I’m guessing you haven’t tried it if you keep saying it’s the same thing.
This provides a very strong incentive for bad actors on Clubhouse to create rooms to ask for money under false/scammy pretenses, and Clubhouse has an unclear moderation policy for that.
On another hand, it provides a strong incentive for Clubhouse to ban such bad actors asap without even a second thought, because Cluhbhouse doesn't make a single dime off them due to not taking a cut from payments.
No conflict of interest and no perverse incentives. Which is in stark contrast to some perverse incentives other popular platforms have, e.g., Twitter and FB being lenient on botting and fake profiles because it drives their usage metrics up (which is the main bread and butter of those two social networks).
You can't really ban "them," because you cannot objectively and factually verify they are bad actors. Check out how many startup pitch groups there are on Clubhouse. Some of those folks are actual investors, and some are just social media publicity stunt gurus. But both can sound equally good. Snake oil salesmen are going make a killing on Clubhouse.
Are you trolling? He's been banned over a dozen times from twitch, OWL, GTA5 RP, for a reason. His chat spills over to other streamers, harasses them on Twitter and Instagram, and spreads misogynistic (whore, slut, etc.), and homophobic, filth.
Not only is he not managing his fanbase, he is actively encouraging stream hopping. Moreover when he was banned from nopixel yesterday, server got ddosed into the ground afterwards ruining other people's streams.
Well that's kind of the big difference - such a bad actor is profitable for Youtube or Twitch (since they earn from the "safe" money stream of ads and engagement and are not in the risky money stream of payments for the shady goods/services), but loss-making if you're a payment intermediary without any direct revenue from their fraudulent schemes like Clubhouse intends to be.
True, although it is not exclusive to Clubhouse. These actors are everywhere on the internet: newsletters, videos, tweets ... This just gives them an easy option to take money directly, instead of first funneling those funds through other products.
Very interesting that they chose to go with a tipping model vs letting creators set up "pay to enter" chat rooms. That would be a lot more useful for the way I normally see the product used.
I guess this was just the easiest lift from the technical side (not too much work beyond copy pasting some Stripe sample code).
Although if it's just a matter of P2P money transfer for tips/donations then I'd rather use something like Venmo or Cash App and pay no fees. If I was a creator on Clubhouse I'd be putting "Venmo me at @XYZ instead of this" on my profile right now.
>Very interesting that they chose to go with a tipping model vs letting creators set up "pay to enter" chat rooms.
I believe the only way around Apple requesting a cut of the payment is to explicitly avoid any notion of "unlocking" extras or access within the app. The tipping method is just a way for users to send money to each other, no biggie... but "unlocking a room" is basically an IAP, or could be defined as one.
Yeah, good point. Here are the explicit guidelines:
3.1.3(d) Person-to-Person Services: If your app enables the purchase of realtime person-to-person services between two individuals (for example tutoring students, medical consultations, real estate tours, or fitness training), you may use purchase methods other than in-app purchase to collect those payments. One-to-few and one-to-many realtime services must use in-app purchase.
Yeah. Your sibling comment drew a distinction, but it seems that distinction has arbitrary holes in its consistency as well. I’m sure if Patreon 50x’ed revenue and traffic starting next month — Apple would begin treating them more harshly.
Is this actually applied properly and consistently? How is a Patreon of videos or audio different than Spotify or Netflix? Didn’t they both have to remove being able to subscribe via their iOS apps unless they wanted to lose a 30% cut? This makes it completely arbitrary then. As I can subscribe to a new Patreon in the app still.
What is the actual monetization strategy other than sending money? Seems a bit weird for anyone to just send money to a creator. Is this meant to be some kind of tip jar?
This is a good point. I would rather have a ticket to enter a room. Or maybe a subscription which could be like a season ticket. The benefit of this would be that it would encourage curation of higher quality content. I would actively look for a room that was worth paying for.
It may in part be because if they kept a percentage Apple would require these payments go through their in-app purchase system, subjecting ClubHouse to the 30% app store fee.
Why they don't charge any fees? I don't use clubhouse (Android) but if I were user I would be happily paying 1-2% fees and would rather prefer seeing service has source of income.
For an early-stage venture-backed startup a small amount of revenue is worse than zero revenue. What the CEO has sold to investors is slices of glorious future potential. But once you have cold, hard cash coming in, suddenly people start evaluating you as a present, actual thing. And in practice, the amount of money coming in from a new, experimental product won't do shit to drop your burn rate. Better to stay in the land of glorious potential until you're sure your revenue graph is going to be the beloved hockey stick.
Because VC. You need growth, at all cost (both monetary and ethical) to get more VC money, and when you’re big enough you exit by selling to a big tech. That’s current Silicon Valley playbook.
As a non-clubhouse user, is this just for supporting creators, or is there something a user might expect in return for sending money?
If I just wanted to support someone, I would think a venmo or cashapp handle is preferable since those are already hooked into my bank account and won't incur fees. I'm guessing this is just a first and necessary step towards adding payments elsewhere in the clubhouse platform though.
I’m surprised. With the explosive uptake they needed to keep on differentiating on features. Room searches, tools for moderation, tools for instant feedback, tools for scammer detection, tools for voting, tools for communicating media, and much more. They chose to add a feature that’s absent from competitors but, I’m guessing, nobody had asked for. My gut feeling is that it won’t last.
I really wonder how this is going to work with the Apple App Store rules on payments. Is the 0% cut so that they can use Stripe? Or is it to bolster their case that they don’t need or want to use Apple Pay? Normally Apple doesn’t like a service offering payments outside of the Apple Pay ecosystem. This seems like a very interesting move.
The strat here is probably to get as many users onboarded as possible ("of course I'll support them directly on Clubhouse, it's the cheapest way to do it!") and then at some point once people have grown accustomed to supporting creators through clubhouse they'll start taking a cut.
You would think they need to grow user count as quickly as possible (like all other VC funded startups), but the fact that they don't have a web app, don't have an Android app and don't have open signups on iOS leaves me very confused about their entire strategy.
Is Clubhouse just being pushed by VCs and other tech celebrities as their personal soapbox, or does it have potential to be something beyond that?
Sure, if done well that works great to generate buzz up to a certain point. Right now though I doubt there's anyone left who really wants a Clubhouse invite but can't get one (so the "exclusivity" thing isn't really driving anyone anymore), and the casual passers-by aren't going to bother jumping through hoops and will just move on.
I wish they would just charge a subscription fee for access to the back catalog and distribute a chunk of it to people based on an algo that encourages discussion and interaction. I have no desire to find 'content' on CH. I have had some awesome conversations with people on a wide range of fairly niche topics that never would have happened 'in the real world' without something like CH attracting a large following.
Is it just me or does Clubhouse totally abuse notifications? I turned it on and it spammed me non-stop for rooms that were nowhere near my interests. I had to deactivate, which made the app pretty pointless because I'm not aware of interesting rooms until afterwards. I wish you could tell apps "give me no more than 5 notifications a day, but those better be damn good notifications".
Also the front page of Clubhouse is just utter nonsense. So much influencer/entrepreneur-bro/bullshit. What I like about something like reddit is that while the default front page is quite trashy, you can curate it with subreddits to get a better experience. Clubhouse, probably due to lack of content, just gives you a mound of trash and expects you to pick out the good bits.
Yes - I had to disable them, but then of course I don't know when people I like and follow (comedians, politicians, etc) are engaging in interesting discourse.
I ended up turning them back on but I still get a lot of them even though I've changed the setting they provide to "less frequent".
First ensure that you have the latest update of Clubhouse installed. Then look at for example this profile (update: link removed, see below.)
Edit: it seems that clicking the link to the profile I shared does not show send money button. Looks like you have to go via a room or club maybe?
Here, try going to this club instead and then visiting some of the profiles there and see if you see the button (again, after you’ve updated): https://www.joinclubhouse.com/club/atsm
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with this club. I post this simply because I saw that they had a room about Clubhouse payments, and people there have the send money button.
Apple guidelines, section 3.1.1, regarding in-app purchases:
>Apps may use in-app purchase currencies to enable customers to “tip” the developer or digital content providers in the app.
Section 3.1.2(d), regarding permissible use of other payment methods:
>3.1.3(d) Person-to-Person Services: If your app enables the purchase of realtime person-to-person services between two individuals (for example tutoring students, medical consultations, real estate tours, or fitness training), you may use purchase methods other than in-app purchase to collect those payments. One-to-few and one-to-many realtime services must use in-app purchase.
It's fuzzy, perhaps, given the word "may". Apple's unofficial advice for fuzzy guideline questions is to implement, submit, and argue your case once it's live.
It's not fuzzy - 3.1.3 says that may not use "purchase methods other than in-app purchase" (since it's not one-to-one person-to-person service but tipping for one-to-many content) and must use in-app purchase.
in the past 4 weeks I've used it for the following, with impressive results:
- Networking
- Learning about micro-cultures
- Practicing my Russian daily
- Motivation & Wellness tips
- SaaS Growth Hacking tips
- Parenting / Relationship Advice
- Improve Jam Sessions using "looping"
- Listening to a whole lot of authentic wisdom
- Remote Sader during Passover
- Having a Q&A w/ God.
I'm amazed you've gotten so much out of the content there. In my testing it was a lot of jabbering on and it was very difficult to find good, relevant rooms.
The awkward conversation between Robinhood CEO getting grilled by Elon Musk was fun to hear. Though I didn't hear it on clubhouse app, I heard it on a YouTube video where they played the recording. I can kind of see the value of this.
Clubhouse works really well for content creators. It enables serendipity it enables being able to interview people who are on the platform. It might not be the most optimal experience for contact consumers.
Full disclosure: I work in the payment space.
-> I really wish that they used crypto for this type of things.
Crypto has some pretty massive advantages.
1) No cc fees if you have a wallet.
2) No risk of censorship
3) support in any country.
Checking https://mempool.space, a low-priority transaction is about $5.99. That could be $50 worth of bitcoin or $500,000 worth of bitcoin to another bitcoin address anywhere in the world, with zero counterparty risk or middlemen.
Of course, using lightning, the payment is instant and cost fractions of a penny.
That's a lot of effort to increase your risk of not having a trusted middleman and pay more fees.
WIth regular systems you have a Bank, a payment processor and a sale processor which collectively provide the following experience:
1) transaction fees at the range of 0.1$ and up at %1-%3 that is incorporated in the price.
2) Visa/MasterCard etc, you don't have to choose your merchant depending on your coins you have, it works everywhere globally
3) Fraud protection is included, if something doesn't work out as expected or you simply made a mistake you get your money back easily
4) payment takes about 1 to 5 seconds and usually is hassle free, like tap a botton to start the payment tap once more to confirm the payment.
5) funds security is guaranteed through reversibility and active security, no risk of going broke when trying to listen to a conversation online.
Crytpo <> Bitcoin.
You can get pretty cheap transactions on other network.
Research Layer 2 Ethereum or blockchain like stellar are great for micro payments
Other networks are irrelevant if my funds are not in that network or the merchant is not on that network. Moving funds between networks tend to be expensive and inconvenient as you need to go through an exchange.
Full disclosure: I’m being pedantic. Are you suggesting Clubhouse doesn’t use cryptography?
More seriously: cryptocurrencies don’t need to be shoved into everything, and I’d like if HN cryptocurrency warriors would stop assuming that it’s the ultimate and stable solution for all payment problems today.
touché ;)
Not really a crypto warrior but I think it makes a lot of sense for mass payments. I used to lead one of the payment team at Uber ... turns out sending money to people all over the world is a pretty hard problem in the traditional finance space.
> To send a payment in Clubhouse, just tap on the profile of a creator (who has the feature enabled) and tap "Send Money".
> Enter the amount you would like to send them. The first time you do this, you’ll be asked to register a credit or debit card.
> 100% of the payment will go to the creator. The person sending the money will also be charged a small card processing fee, which will go directly to our payment processing partner, Stripe. Clubhouse will take nothing.
That's unusually generous. Apple and Google take note.
I think it's naive to think that they're doing this out of pure goodwill. They've taken over $100 million in funding in only a year of being in business. Since they're so new, my estimate is that they're generating goodwill with consumers before any of their investors are expecting to make their money back. Given the sheer number of Clubhouse competitors, this is probably a smart move for their business. They get to generate reactions like yours en masse.
They're building a strong brand and reputation to beat out the competition, and they'll only start monetizing once they've won.
Apple Pay Cash (the one in the Messages app), Google Pay take $0.00 for person-to-person payments. Given Clubhouse isn't formally introducing some sort of monthly payment or "pay me for access to Clubhouse streams" thing, they can probably argue they're just creating another P2P money sending service.
If they pay out money to creators in a reasonable time, then a fraudulent "creator" (accounts created with fake/stolen identities and tipped with stolen cards) will withdraw anything ASAP and there won't be anything to remove/recover; and if they want to protect from that, then they have to do invasive verification and/or freeze any income for a quite long time.
Yes, But they would incur an additional service charge for that dispute. That’s the worst part about being a merchant. Someone buys a digital product from you, then they file a chargeback. You are then down the original charge plus a fee that can be as much as $25 or more.
I wonder how this will compete with things like substack.
Will creator support like clubhouse's payments, undermine or enhance things like payments from platforms like substack.
I use both for my newsletter: For example my newsletter ProductiveGrowth , weekly stories about productivity, leadership, motivation, and anything else that helps us and our teams grow and be more productive.
I don't use either payment option now, but make me wonder which to use.
Well imagine if they had an Android app in the first place or earlier right before all the big players started copying them, then it would have been attractive to the users. Right now, what is the point if the invite system is still there.
Another platform can just announce the same thing and they are back to square zero.
> We are excited to see how people use it, and to continue working hard to help the amazing members of the Clubhouse community grow and thrive.
Yet, with no Android app and an increasing amount of competitors copying the hell out of Clubhouse, I can only see this going in the way of Meerkat, Yik Yak and Periscope. (By being shut down)