Except that's not true, having experienced it, I would say that ClubHouse produces intimacy as a service. I've had magical conversations on the application that I've never had anywhere else.
Saying that it's just another product and that it can be copied in 5 minutes is missing the point. The choices that they've made, their decision to eschew everything except for voice, help create a medium that is intimate, thoughtful, and kind. And otherwise busy people are addicted to it.
Someone I know said that talking on ClubHouse felt like being back at Stanford. Just the electrifying conversations. The sense of possibility. There's something special here.
Recently, I decided that I'd like to interview a cosmonaut who has never been interviewed by the west before. To tell his story before a broader audience. And I started a ClubHouse room to do it, and people from around the world came together to help me. Including people who knew him! I'm just a stranger, but they heard me explain why I wanted to preserve this man's legacy and that was enough. People were happy to chip in and help.
That's magical. And I haven't experienced anything like that before. There's this profound sense of intimacy that this platform produces that's missing elsewhere.
I keep repeating myself, but there is something here. It's a mistake to discount it.
It's hard for me to think of anything less niche than "like being at Stanford" given the extreme, tech-focused, affluent, bourgeois-as-fuck description that implies.
The average person doesn't want to spend hours listening to thought leaders who are in love with their own voice pontificating randomly on topics that don't affect or address their lives in any way. To believe that they will to such an extent that A16Z is willing to give them a $4B given zero revenue, declining traction, and no clear business shows that all you need to do to gain ever-increasing valuations in the tech world is to serve up the exact kind of frou-frou, nebulous bullshit that you wrote and that VCs eat up.
> given the extreme, tech-focused, affluent, bourgeois-as-fuck description that implies
While I understand where you're coming from, this is the kind of conversation that has turned me off from most of the internet.
On the months I've been on ClubHouse, I've never had an exchange like this. But elsewhere on the web? It's fairly common.
Text is a hard medium to discuss complicated ideas in. It's too easy to be snarky. You get kudos for it. But that's harder to do in voice. Because you'd have to hear my reaction, and the reactions of others. You'd have to hear how off-putting it is.
I prefer ClubHouse now, because the rest of the web is so snarky. And do you blame me? Given how you've reacted to me?
You're telling me right now Clubhouse has no trolls, and you believe the reason for this is because it's hard to troll with voice? I'm pretty sure it's because trolls have simply never discovered it. Honestly, I would vastly prefer to be snarky to people in real-time with my voice and hear their immediate, unedited reactions.
For the first time I actually want to try Clubhouse.
> Honestly, I would vastly prefer to be snarky to people in real-time with my voice and hear their immediate, unedited reactions.
That's very sad.
You'll get booted the second you try and the conversation will continue on. You'll then get banned from the room/community. And if you do it often enough, from the platform.
The person who invited you will also get banned if enough of their invitees do such things.
That's one of the benefits of making it invite only. There's an inherent social graph to who is inviting whom; it's like a giant house party. You don't want to be the person who brought the asshole who harshed the vibe. Even if you don't care, the house rules are simple - bring bad guests often enough, and you won't get invited to the party. It's that simple.
So yeah, use your shot to chill with interesting scientists, engineers, artists, and assorted people from across the world to troll them. It's yours to waste.
Sounds like a gated internet community. Given the current state of online discourse, that’s understandable. But a little trolling, with the appropriate level of cutting wit, goes a long way towards skewering the bloviations of the thought leader class. It’s most unhackerlike to side with the mods.
I mean I already talk to scientists, engineers, artists and assorted people from across the world without Clubhouse. This has nothing to do with the people and everything to do with the platform. It sounds like fun to me.
Personally, your description of how you use Clubhouse sounds sad to me. Different strokes for different folks, my man.
The problem is not that you prefer clubhouse. Instead, it is that you have ascribed some magical property to it, and are treating it like it is some revolution.
That is great that you have found something that you prefer. But there is no need to talk in such grandious terms, when talking about a voice chat app.
Twitter is perhaps the biggest change in how people communicate in the 21st century so far. I would say that was a laughable underestimation. Would you like to expand on your point?
I don't make judgements on whether a global phenomenon is "stupid" or not, because frankly I think doing so is stupid itself. If everybody goes in a stupid direction, you can pretend it doesn't matter, but you'll be wrong.
Just because it isn't important and profound to you personally doesn't mean it's stupid. Whatever you mean by that word anyway.
Anyway, this all stems from a fundamental misreading. I said that things can both be drastic, and stupid. I never said what, nor claimed that something significant and profound cannot also be stupid.
> But there is no need to talk in such grandious terms, when talking about a voice chat app.
This is the statement I'm responding to. I think it demonstrates a lack of vision, and I'm trying to correct it. So yeah, basically different conversations at this point.
I was making a general point. I wasn’t even talking about Twitter. Though I do agree that Twitter is simultaneously significant and has engendered a lot of stupidity. Many things throughout history have been both great and stupid.
There's nothing fundamentally limiting SMS to being stuck to that. That SMS didn't add better 1:something capabilities is an indictment of post-1995 cellular carrier pricing models and greed.
They could have prevented and owned the entire messaging space, all of which is essentially an attempt to recreate basic messaging functionality that SMS lacks.
You seem to be confusing group chat with Twitter. And who exactly would "own the messaging space"? SMS is a protocol available to any carrier in any country.
I'm viewing both as a way to transport short messages from senders to receivers
On the search side, there's nothing stopping a carrier from indexing public SMSs and making them discoverable. We're not talking about rocket science, in the basic realization [0].
I'm not sure why HN is looking at these things like (short blobs of text) are completely different than (short blobs of text). Everything built around them is plumbing. Complicated, difficult plumbing, but plumbing nonetheless.
I'm all ears as to why providing an SMS service that supports all of Twitter's features would have been technically impossible... say, circa-2000.
It wasn't impossible, but nobody did it. The lightbulb had been possible for many years before Edison commercialized it and made it feasible for the mainstream.
The way you are looking at things, the iphone isn't really an upgrade over the blackberry or palm pilot.
Palm didn't have 6+ years of iPod / iTunes profits to plow into R&D. And Blackberry's core customer didn't yet know they were interested in something like an iPhone: a mobile Bloomberg terminal was the apple of their eye.
I think we're in agreement while disagreeing. My fascination isn't so much that the phone companies couldn't do it (because they could), but that they didn't (because they couldn't even imagine it).
Props to Twitter for envisioning the product, but "What if?" phone companies had {Twitter, Facebook} is an entirely plausible, albeit organizationally-unlikely present.
It would have required them to pivot their thinking from maximally taxing use of capital-intensive investments to growing scalable platforms, but stranger things have happened. And the internet's growth was already obvious in that time frame.
We're really not agreeing because I don't find it surprising that phone companies didn't invent Twitter, just like I don't find it surprising that Blackberry didn't invent the iphone
You're right that the protocol is nothing fancy, and that's what makes the 'plumbing' the most important factor. Twitter could be implemented as a pub/sub message queue. That's cool, but nobody would use it if there weren't a nice client and a controlled network to use it on.
Twitter is only important to the in-group that uses it. To them, it feels bigger and more important than it is because half of it is made up of bots and spammers inflating numbers and activity.
Social media is unfortunately one of the biggest changes in how people communicate this century so far but Twitter is only a small part of that.
That in group includes mainstream media journalists who report on it and influential people who read it and make decisions based on it. I can't believe you're making that argument with a straight face. We just had the Twitter president (who's been kneecapped by the Twitter ban, if you need another example of its power).
The ways Facebook, Insta, etc are being used now are heavily influenced by what Twitter started doing first.
Right, the tiny in-group of mainstream journalists and elites use it and place way too much weight on what's being said on the platform. Outside of that, most of America (& the world?) doesn't give a crap about what blue checks are saying. That doesn't stop journalists from twisting themselves into pretzels over what this or that person tweeted. I'm not saying it's not important and influential to the people using it, I'm saying those people think everyone else feels the same way and that's not the case.
It's trivial to buy a bot farm and pump up your tweets to make it seem you have a large following or tons of people agree with your opinion when in fact it's all manufactured. But hey, all that tech is complicated right? Better to not think about it... /s
Social networks do have magical properties to them but there's no playbook for how to create magic. They're in some ways no different than the magic people find in IRL communities. You can't force it. The early years of Reddit was an online experience that was really different than anything else out there at the time. Really high signal to noise, easily being able to find other people with people who shared your niche interests. Tumblr has that magic too and somehow managed to keep it but is focused on a demographic that is damn near the compliment to Reddit. Facebook and Twitter had and lost their magic. Among young and young-ish people TikTok currently has it, time will tell I suppose if it stays.
I'm not a Clubhouse user but I wouldn't at all be surprised if it had it based on how people talk about it.
I never said it wasn't technically difficult to do something like that at scale. Although, from what I have heard, they actually have outsourced most of the technical parts of the app, to some other company also.
The point though, is that you should not pretend like this is some revolutionary new thing, that is going to change all of society.
Thats all. Its a voice chat app. No need to ascribe anything magic to it.
> It's not a flying car or a spaceship
Ok great, so you agree with me that the person I was responding too was being kinda silly, by describing a voice chat app, in magic, grandiose terms.
I think most of us would agree that they've changed society for the worse. It pains me as a starry-eyed techie kid from the 90s that this is what we've done. Life was so much better before social media.
People do in fact have life-changing experiences through social contact. I.e. by having conversations and meeting people of kinds they hadn’t previously experienced.
It’s therefore reasonable to expect, just by the numbers, that a novel social platform with millions of users interacting can create or facilitate such experiences for some people.
> This logic seems to be flawed on the face of it.
It is really not. If your reaction to finding out about clubhouse, is to breakdown crying, about the new voice chat app that you have found, then you almost certainly have mental issues that you should try to resolve.
> by having conversations and meeting people
Thats great. But if your reaction to this, is to talk about this like it is a new religion that you have joined, then you almost certainly have legitimate issues in your life, that you should seek professional help for.
Its a voice chat app. That is fine to like it. But having a coming to jesus moment, means that you are almost certainly mentally ill, and need help.
> just by the numbers
Yes, I am sure that just by the numbers, that there have been multiple people who will talk about the new voice chat app, like it is the greatest thing to ever come into their life, and they will break down crying while talking about it, as if it their new cult/religion that they have joined.
But that is the problem. Those people need professional help.
I’m not sure where you are getting the impression that people are having religious experiences on clubhouse. Care to share your sources for that?
As for crying as a result of positive social contact, why do you think that is abnormal?
People cry on FaceTime or Zoom calls, or the phone as a normal part of social interaction what makes you think they wouldn’t cry sometimes through interactions on clubhouse?
Are you a mental health profession?
I’d be curious to know what diagnostic criteria or research models you are using to determine that people should seek help.
Social media is revolutionary for many people. It can be inspirational in both good and bad ways. Without social media, the Black Lives Matter movement wouldn't be as wide-reaching, but then again neither would ISIS. I would say these two examples have changed many lives.
Sigh.... Not sure why it is so hard for people to understand my point. But lets try again with another example.
Lets say that you met someone who just learned about chocolate chip cookies. And they like chocolate chip cookies. They like them so much, that they break down crying, every time they talk cookies. Their entire life is now a cookie lifestyle. They have found a new cookie religion.
What would you think of this person? Personally, I would think that this person is mentally ill and needs to seek professional help.
This is an analogy here. Take everything that I said, about this cookie person, and apply it to clubhouse.
Sometimes, it legitimately feels like people are talking about clubhouse, in the same way as this hypothetically mentally ill cookie person.
Do you understand the problem here, of why it would be both a problem, for someone to talk about cookies, or clubhouse, in this way that I have described?
> They like them so much, that they break down crying, every time they talk cookies.
Who actually does this?
It seems like you are seeing this behavior a lot so it should be easy to find an example.
> Their entire life is now a cookie lifestyle.
A lot of people who join social clubs spend a lot of time at them. That’s not particularly unusual. I don’t see why it would be different for a virtual social club, especially at a time when in-person social experiences are more scarce.
It is of course possible that clubhouse selects for people with a kind of mental illness or personality type, but you aren’t making any case for that - you just saying ‘it’ is a problem.
I am being a tab bit hyperbolic, in order to get people to, at the very least, concede the point, that there is some level of obsession with a new voice chat app that is unhealthy.
Because it seems like people are almost being intentionally obtuse, and are intentionally misinterpreting my point, in bad faith, in order to win some "debate" that nobody was ever having.
If you are willing to agree, that absolutely people could be too obsessed with a voice chat app, then that is my point.
It is unfortunate that I have to explain this in such extreme terms, in order for people to understand the point I am trying to make. But here we are.
If you want an example, you can just look at the blog post that someone else made about clubhouse, in this very hacker news thread, that described clubhouse in terms, that, although are not as extreme as the hyperbolic example that I gave, should at the very least get you to understand the point I am trying to make here, about... shall we say... at least a moderate amount of unhealthy levels of obsession.
In this blog post, the person describes how they have literally lived in "isolation" for a decade, and that there were time periods, where they did not speak to another human for months.
And they use this personal example, of literal isolation for a decade, to describe how clubhouse, changed their life, or something.
Like I said, I was being a tad hyperbolic before, but when we are talking about people writing about clubhouse, who spent their life in isolation for a decade, you should be able to understand the point I am trying to make here.
You have posted a link to a person who has chosen to live in isolation for more than a decade to satisfy their own curiosity - which obviously has nothing to do with clubhouse. It’s not really clear why that’s relevant to anything.
Why would it be so surprising that clubhouse would change such a person’s life?
Clearly this person’s choices are unusual, but I don’t really see how you deduce anything about clubhouse or its users in general.
> It’s not really clear why that’s relevant to anything.
It is relevant, because you asked for an example. This was a blogpost about clubhouse, and they are using their insane, personal experience, of living in isolation for a decade, to satisfy their curiosity, as some situation that is related to clubhouse, according to them.
That is crazy. That is insane. And I should not have to explain to you why that is the case.
If someone is talking about clubhouse this way, then I have absolutely no problem, with describing such a blog post, as my example of unhealthy levels of obsession.
> Clearly this person’s choices are unusual
You asked for an example, and I gave you one that satifies what you asked for. I am glad you agree that this is an example of unusual behavior.
> and they are using their insane, personal experience, of living in isolation for a decade, to satisfy their curiosity, as some situation that is related to clubhouse, according to them.
I didn’t see them suggest that their choice to isolate was somehow related to clubhouse. What gave you that idea?
> That is crazy. That is insane. And I should not have to explain to you why that is the case.
Unfortunately I think you may need to. What exactly are you saying is insane? The person who wrote that piece?
> their choice to isolate was somehow related to clubhouse
> What gave you that idea?
The way that it is related to their writing/blog post about clubhouse, is that they put it in their writing/blog, about clubhouse.
> The person who wrote that piece?
Yes. As you noted, their choices are "unusual", to put it lightly. I am glad that you agree and that I have provided a good example, of someone who does "unusual" things, talking about clubhouse in this way.
These are the people who I am talking about. The people who do "unusual" things like spend a literal decade in isolation, and then using their experience, in their writings about clubhouse.
You asked for an example, and I gave you one. Glad you agree that I have given you this example.
You already agreed that their choice, to spend a decade in isolation, was unusual.
If we want to use a euphemism, and it looks like I will have to do so given how you are acting, I'll just stick with that position, that you agreed is the case.
Spending a decade in isolation is pretty "unusual", and you have already agreed that this is the case.
So I'll just have to stick with the word that you already agreed to call it, given that you are unwilling to understand basically anything that I am saying.
Both you and I agree, that this is pretty darn "unusual". And if that is the only word that you will concede describes the situation, then I guess I am ok with simply saying that their decisions are pretty darn "unusual", and we'll just use that as the euphemism, and the example that you asked for.
Ok, well lets just go with that then. When people who do things like spend a decade in isolation, and then use that example in the writings about clubhouse, well that is what I am talking about.
There is no need to talk about a voicechat app, in this way, or take such a person seriously, as a normal example, of a normal opinion on a voice chat app.
Are you saying that you cannot think of any way or argument, as for why a person's opinion on social interaction, and social apps, would be invalidated in any way, due to the fact that they are an individual who chose to spent a decade in isolation?
You really cannot come up with any reasons yourself, as for why their opinion, could be at least a little bit suspect, or why it could be OK to dismiss their opinion on these topics, given that they chose to spend a decade in isolation?
Generally, when having a conversation with someone, and they ask 1 million questions, that they should know the answer to, my only conclusion that I will be able to reach is that they are acting in bad faith.
> it’s not clear how this piece is related to your earlier comments
You truly cannot think of any parallels, or ways, in which the analogy is related, between these types of behavior? C'mon. I know you can think this through here.
These are simple statements here. I know you can figure this out.
> A16Z is willing to give them a $4B given zero revenue, declining traction, and no clear business shows that all you need to do to gain ever-increasing valuations in the tech world is to serve up the exact kind of frou-frou, nebulous bullshit that you wrote and that VCs eat up.
This sounds like a self-correcting problem if true.
It's not self-correcting at all. VC are incentivized to keep throwing money at these dumb ideas because if even one of them takes off, there are disproportionate returns to be had come IPO time.
> VC are incentivized to keep throwing money at these dumb ideas because if even one of them takes off, there are disproportionate returns to be had come IPO time.
Rich people funding low probability but high expected value moonshots is the system working as intended.
> thought leaders who are in love with their own voice pontificating randomly on topics that don't affect or address their lives in any way
Yes, those conversations are dreadful. And there are a lot of them. But you’re doing just another version of “Reddit is a website filled with silly cat pictures” here.
> Someone I know said that talking on ClubHouse felt like being back at Stanford.
I think this quote reveals a lot more than the person you know necessarily intended.
> Recently, I decided that I'd like to interview a cosmonaut who has never been interviewed by the west before.
I would have loved to listen to this conversation, but unfortunately, I come from a working-class background in the UK, and as such, I don't know anyone who would have a Clubhouse invite to give me. I'm not trying to make any assumptions about your background here, and I'm sure there are many people on Clubhouse who come from un-privileged backfrounds, but perhaps the intimacy of the environment comes from being surrounded by people who come from a similar place (i.e: Ivy League colleges, Silicon Valley companies) due to the exclusivity Clubhouse has imposed.
I'm sorry but the things you describe as selling points of the platform are merely byproducts of the argument you are replying to. Every gated and hyped community that gets a touch of the right people talking about it will feel very friendly and "high quality" for a while. The circumstance basically postpones the need for moderation.
It's something that was never going to last, and as far as I can see it is already over. Yes I gave Clubhouse an honest try after it was all hyped up at my workplace, what I encountered was overwhelmingly 1) Get rich quick scammers talking about how to get success like "Rich Person XYZ" or 2) Celebrities (of varying degrees) talking to/with their fans (or rather: bathing in their narcissism).
Hardly what I would describe as magical. And from what I can see even this artificial hype is already starting to die.
It is something everyone who ever played the closed beta or alpha versions of an online game before knows, those are cool, friendly and brimming with interesting encounters too while it lasts.
Do you honestly believe the feeling and special community you describe is something that is still around on there or will be still around in a month or two?
Great analogy to a closed alpha or beta for an online game. I played the WoW beta way back in the day - interactions with other players and the sense of community was completely different before vs after public launch. Perhaps related to the early adopter vs mainstream adoption in the innovation S-curve.
Not my experience. Clubhouse is more like C-tier people listening to B-tier people talking about A-tier people.
The thing about Clubhouse is that it doesn’t matter who is listening, it only matters who is talking. Unless you're an A-tier person, nobody will care if you're not there.
In that way Clubhouse is the same as podcasts.
None of this makes Clubhouse bad. It just means it’s not that different from recorded interviews for example.
> I'd like to interview a cosmonaut who has never been interviewed by the west before. To tell his story before a broader audience. And I started a ClubHouse room to do it,
The broad audience being a bunch of Westerners on an iOS-only, invite-only app?
So basically, you are saying that the value of Clubhouse is the marketing they have done to make people use it in a certain way and attract some profiles?
All that could be done on discord, but discord is far gaming, so it won't happen.
But clubhouse seems to be perceived has "the place to hear quality conversation from important people". I can see value in that if the team manage to live it up to it. Not as a user though, but I'm not the target.
Clubhouse basically brings Silicon Valley style serendipity to the world. With work and social interactions increasingly being moved online and reaching remote people, the value prop of living in Silicon Valley is rapidly diminishing.
Saying that it's just another product and that it can be copied in 5 minutes is missing the point. The choices that they've made, their decision to eschew everything except for voice, help create a medium that is intimate, thoughtful, and kind. And otherwise busy people are addicted to it.
Someone I know said that talking on ClubHouse felt like being back at Stanford. Just the electrifying conversations. The sense of possibility. There's something special here.
Recently, I decided that I'd like to interview a cosmonaut who has never been interviewed by the west before. To tell his story before a broader audience. And I started a ClubHouse room to do it, and people from around the world came together to help me. Including people who knew him! I'm just a stranger, but they heard me explain why I wanted to preserve this man's legacy and that was enough. People were happy to chip in and help.
That's magical. And I haven't experienced anything like that before. There's this profound sense of intimacy that this platform produces that's missing elsewhere.
I keep repeating myself, but there is something here. It's a mistake to discount it.