Ask HN: What happened to Clubhouse?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30822682

by shamoo • 4 years ago

155 158 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I've not been following its development. I do not hear about anymore. I guess the hype has died out. Is it still popular? Is it still gaining users? What went wrong? Have more viable competitors risen?

colesantiago3• 4 years ago

what is clubhouse?

bitxbitxbitcoin• 4 years ago

An audio forward social networking app that sprung up last year.

colesantiago3• 4 years ago

Isn't that Twitter spaces?

Never heard of Clubhouse.

seanhunter• 4 years ago

My hypothesis is that a lot of the early hype was down to people who liked the idea of being part of an exclusive club but didn't really like when everyone else was also part of the club.

Then twitter launched "Spaces", meaning people could have a similar experience to clubhouse without building yet another social network.

gutitout• 4 years ago

This is absolutely correct. They build a nice map of everyone’s contacts and that was the value.

mikeryan• 4 years ago

I don’t think its just exclusivity, in the sense that “I’m one of the cool kids”. If the Clubhouse concept was based on conversations amongst a peer group then you need some exclusivity, just to have a manage the number of people in the conversation. Once anyone could join and you had more then maybe 10 people and the conversation aspect become too hard to manage and everything just basically became a podcast.

scyzoryk_xyz4• 4 years ago

The Twitter Spaces move reminds me of the Instagram Stories move. As in life, upstarts with killer new features sometimes manage to take only a temporary hold and are easy to rip off if they don't manage to protect what they've got.

nebula88043• 4 years ago

Did Twitter Spaces actually take off? My only experience of it was super early on when a celebrity I really likes joined a Twitter space to promote her new project but in an effort to record the conversation, I discovered that the iPad was not supported at the time. :/

Since then I have not heard a peep about Twitter Spaces.

paulcole• 4 years ago

I’m always intrigued when I see someone make such a bold prediction. What did you base it on?

debuggerpk• 4 years ago

i think twitter spaces.

kowsheek• 4 years ago

You mean that iPhone advertisement?

Pandemic ⤵ Clubhouse ⤵ NFT ⤵

I call it the #Clubhouse Correlation.

Mo3• 4 years ago

That makes the most sense.

freedomben2• 4 years ago

Clubhouse renamed to shortcut, but is otherwise still cruising. clubhouse.io now redirects to shortcut.com. Otherwise still runnin' fine.

willcipriano• 4 years ago

I thought clubhouse was a social media site now it's apparently:

Project management has never been easier
We bring the flow to your software team's workflow. Plan, collaborate, build, and measure success with Shortcut.

Scandiravian2• 4 years ago

It's two different companies, which I guess was part of the motivation for clubhouse.io to change name to shortcut, since clubhouse.com became massively popular in a very short time

hobimatemaatik• 4 years ago

I mean clubhouse.com is their actual address

spicybright• 4 years ago

That's a terrible name change lol. Might as well have been "social" or "desktop".

legerdemain• 4 years ago

We tried it for a while at work, but the data model of nested epics and workflows and issues didn't work very well for our "matrix org" team, and we went back to Jira after a few months.

nowherebeen2• 4 years ago

Do people still remember Bird? Same thing happening to Clubhouse. These startups were massively hyped up by VCs, but can’t stand the test of time. I suspect a Web3 startup will be the next thing VCs will hype up.

hevalon• 4 years ago

I suspect a Web3 startup will be the next thing VCs will hype up.

You mean, the whole NFT hype? Just happened. What's next? I'm betting on some VR/AR/XR thing (like pokemon Go, but different, same-same, but different).

bibinou2• 4 years ago

So, Gowalla?

miki123211• 4 years ago

The blind community is still there, maybe not as strong as it was, but we still use it a lot. I guess the audio-only nature of it, in the age of picture-based apps like Instagram, really made a difference.

latchkey• 4 years ago

While I appreciate that it helps the blind community, the deaf community was really left out. I personally saw at least one complaint about this in a group that I'm in.

opdahl• 4 years ago

An interesting note on this is that Twitter are rolling out Speech to Text for their Spaces.

scyzoryk_xyz4• 4 years ago

I'm sorry if this is a bit insensitive, but if we're talking about a sound conversation based platform, isn't it a bit absurd for deaf communities to be upset?

sergiotapia2• 4 years ago

It became Shortcut: https://shortcut.com/

umeshunni• 4 years ago

Different Clubhouse.

mosselman• 4 years ago

Not the same clubhouse, but is shortcut any good?

sergiotapia2• 4 years ago

Trello too simple.

JIRA too complex.

Shortcut shits right in the sweet spot. Try it. It works well with small 2 man teams, and large 65 man teams.

paxys• 4 years ago

Nothing happened to it. It still exists, and still has users. The buzz it had a while ago has died down, and several competitors have emerged (like Twitter Spaces). I imagine it still has a boat load of VC money in the bank, so whether it can figure out a successful business model or not remains to be seen.

christopherslee• 4 years ago

I thought it was interesting to think about what Clubhouse was displacing. It felt the most analogous to radio. So, what could you do if you had radio at internet scale? Or what would it take to make internet scale radio successful?

In my mind, it came down to how challenging it would be to produce and monetize content. It's non trivial work. Producing a good radio show that's worth listening to takes a lot of time and effort. Podcasts are a good example here. I think there's data out there that suggests most podcasts don't have more than 1 episode or survive the first year. Without a good way to monetize, it's not worth the effort.

So while easy in the short term for celebrities/influencers/celebrities/VCs to jump on the bandwagon, the effort wouldn't be sustainable or worth it to them in the long run, and then you have a content problem again.

I also experienced some dark onboarding patterns while I checked it out that make me suspect their growth numbers were a bit over inflated, in an ask for forgiveness later kind of situation.

tptacek2• 4 years ago

We've had Internet radio for almost 2 decades; it's called "podcasts". It's literally eaten "real" radio; NPR probably has more podcasts than broadcasts now.

Kye5• 4 years ago

That seems to support christopherslee's point. NPR already had what it needed institutionally to do podcasts people wanted to listen to and the reach to make sure they have a chance to reach an audience. I could start one and probably do okay because I already know a bit about audio engineering and marketing and can make my own music, but most people start from 0.

snowwrestler• 4 years ago

Clubhouse filled in for going out and talking to people.

I don’t think their decline is any great mystery. Concern about the pandemic declined, people started going out again, and stopped listening in on audio chats on the Internet.

Twitter Spaces is not doing great either, but it doesn’t really matter because it’s just a feature, not a whole business.

azinman2• 4 years ago

If you could go out and talk to celebrities, sure. Or hear off the cuff celebrities from different worlds mix.

That’s what made it so exciting in the beginning… making it feel like you were part of an exclusive club even if you weren’t a famous person. Eventually the hype fades because the bar lowers, and the most interesting people move on.

Your point about Covid is also fair… the timing was good.

Litost• 4 years ago

This came up on one of the networks I'm in, disclaimer I've never used it, but fyi here's a couple of articles that were referenced in the conversation:

https://onezero.medium.com/what-happened-to-clubhouse-b347fe...

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

shafyy2• 4 years ago

Does anybody remember the app Yo?

NelsonMinar• 4 years ago

jurassic• 4 years ago

ja27• 4 years ago

Bro

omginternets• 4 years ago

I loved that app. My screen name was "IAMPOOPING" and I used to "yo" people when... you know ...

thomasswift• 4 years ago

The was a new version called GM (unless they updated it to do more) - you guessed it GM!

jayzalowitz2• 4 years ago

I actually was a consultant there.

shafyy2• 4 years ago

Tell us more

rvz• 4 years ago

The Clubhouse hype train and its hype-sqaud on board have ran out of steam after been copied to death by everyone else and the discussions there have derailed into a space for spam, scammers and the same VCs like a16z aggressively spamming notifications to everyone.

As predicted in [0] of its questionable valuation and the competitors surrounding and copying it makes you wonder if they will be still around in a few years time.

What went wrong?

Late release of Android app. (It was iOS only) and was invite-only for longer than a year and even after competitors copied them. And yes. As all predicted here [1]. So this outcome was really unsurprising and expected.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883362

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26044382

croes• 4 years ago

Remember Vero?

martin_a• 4 years ago

After the FOMO died, it became unseen as fast as it became visible eight weeks earlier. Wasn't a funny time on my LinkedIn, though, with all the cool kids posing...

DyslexicAtheist• 4 years ago

it just popped up again on my feed after many weeks of silence because apparently Russian regulators have forgotten to censor it (no idea about the source - fwiw the articles may have been written by growth-haxxors):

https://www.inputmag.com/culture/russians-ukraine-war-clubho...

https://topwhich.com/the-second-life-of-clubhouse-the-forgot...

zackbloom• 4 years ago

The most wild thing, to me, is how effectively it has been taken over by scam artists. The other day I tuned into a 'startup pitch' show where the premise is you pitch your company idea to an 'investor'. Unfortunately in practice the investor applauds your idea, and then claims he will 'invest' engineering time worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, but he needs you to 'prove you are serious' by investing tens of thousands of dollars of your own money.

I'm sure after putting up the cash you are handed some janky app worth nothing close to what you paid, much less his supposed investment. While maybe not being illegal, it was incredibly predatory. The 'entrepreneurs' weren't being asked the most basic questions about their business, and were clearly not financially in a place to invest the money he was demanding. Rather than helping them achieve an entrepreneurial dream, he is sucking up the limited money they have (perhaps even inviting them to take on debt) without any real hope of success.

It seems like every channel on Clubhouse is some version of exploitation, whether it's about crypto, your love life, or your money. I don't know how I would moderate that away if I was them, but it seems like the time to do it was several months ago, and now might be too late.

xwdv2• 4 years ago

I remember entering a channel once that was just a bunch of “Queens” with hot avatars sitting at the top, and the host who was some dude with a smooth big black guy voice would talk with the audience and ask people “which of these queens would you like to sponsor?” and people would donate money to them or whatever. And the queens would also talk a bit if they felt like it. God it was stupid, one of the last channels I checked out before dropping this app completely.

PragmaticPulp• 4 years ago

This is how I remember most of the Clubhouse content during the initial popularity.

There were exceptions such as famous VCs, authors, and tech people doing Q&A, but everything else felt like content marketers, online course sellers, and crypto scammers having a field day with their sudden access to a lot of bored and curious people.

Outside of a few pre-scheduled and planned Clubhouse events, I never actually found anything organically interesting on the platform.

mr_beans• 4 years ago

Don’t forget all the “Life Coaches”

sly010• 4 years ago

so basically the internet

b20000• 4 years ago

clubhouse is full of VCs and angels. wannabe celebrities.

cwillu• 4 years ago

Somebody got sick of saying “if I had a nickle for every time somebody had some great idea for an app” and decided to go out there and get the nickle.

cosmodisk• 4 years ago

There's a company that does something very similar a few floors up in our office building. The website is atrocious,the 'tech' is so absurd that it could win absurd of a month award. Yet, the most expensive cars, with the company logo, some shady links with Russia and etc. It's a joke. I feel bad for people who fall for it.

riffic• 4 years ago

upvoting everyone referring to the project management app here, lol.

davidbarker2• 4 years ago

I was an avid user of Clubhouse for a year after joining in January 2021 — I probably spent around 12 hours per day (I know, it’s a lot) on Clubhouse for most of 2021.

I’ve met a handful of people who I now consider good friends (despite not having met them in person yet).

However (and I don’t want to be too critical as I don’t have internal insights or data), they had/have a few glaring issues that ended up pushing away many of the people I met during my time on the app.

* They let mis/disinformation run rampant, particularly regarding (but not limited to) COVID vaccines. I worked with healthcare professionals to combat this misinformation by running room with science based evidence (with none of us getting compensated, of course) but we had no help from anyone at Clubhouse themselves. They seemed happy to allow rooms that most of us believed would lead to deaths to stay open, presumably because they got a lot of engagement at a time when Clubhouse was clearly losing steam.

* When I joined, the variety of rooms was massive. I enjoyed start up rooms, JavaScript rooms, science rooms. But over time, as people left, those rooms disappeared. And the rooms that grew were the ones which the room owners knew would get engagement — general drama. This person fighting with another person. Anti-vaccine misinformation. General topics that didn’t have any substance but would provide entertainment because of the disagreements you heard on stage. Fun for a while, but not a long term plan.

* Clubhouse didn’t incentivise “good” rooms. The rooms I enjoyed had world-leading experts talking about exciting topics. But Clubhouse’s Creator First program didn’t seem interested in those at all. This program was more focused on novel entertainment ideas, and in the end became a bit of a running joke with users because it ultimately did nothing for creators — even the ones who were part of it.

* Of course, a big problem Clubhouse had was beyond its control. As lockdowns eased, people had less time on their own which meant less time on Clubhouse.

In the end, what drove most of my friends away, and what caused me to stop visiting was the notification spam.

So many people I knew turned their notifications off within a week or two of joining because the notifications you’d receive on your phone were relentless. There were minimal controls provided, so your option was either to allow them all or turn them all off. I didn’t mind them because I was enjoying Clubhouse, and after a while I figured out the right setting that allowed me to get notifications that interested me but not the more spammy ones. But that took me a long time, and I’m tech savvy. Many people aren’t and don’t have the patience, so they just turned them all off. Without that daily/hourly reminder, they started to forget about the app.

And I ended up being one of them. At the start of 2022, my perfectly curated notification options started to be ignored and I was suddenly receiving 100+ Clubhouse notifications per day. I thought maybe it was a bug (other people on Twitter had noticed the same — almost like a switch had been flipped), but after a few weeks I was still being bombarded with notifications and I had no other option but to turn them off completely. Then… I stopped using Clubhouse. The people I had enjoyed spending time with were no longer there — driven away by disinterest and drama. My efforts to make the platform better in some small way were ignored. And I no longer had the constant reminder to visit.

I still open the app every day or two to see what’s in the hallway, but not much has changed for the better. I sometimes have private rooms with friends for a quick chat, but even that’s becoming less frequent.

It’s a shame. I don’t remember a social network providing as much entertainment and excitement to me as Clubhouse did around this time last year. But it’s just not the same so I’ve mostly said goodbye.

tegiddrone• 4 years ago

The guilty-pleasure entertainment from drama makes sense. Though I interpreted it in part a side effect of the ephemeral nature of a room, strongly discouraging recording. A place where it was difficult to be held accountable by being recorded in some form and refuted more formally. A platform that rewards the underdeveloped thoughts in ones head. Maybe that's just social media in general but felt like it was sharper here. I stopped coming before they added the clipping feature.

My favorite example was when there was some comradery in a room about a guy divorcing his wife because she got COVID vaccinated and there was some unfounded ideas about a sexually transmitted thing about the vaccines. It would be interesting if they would allow the audience to have some passive feedback, like thumbs down "I disagree with the stage." Then at least it wouldn't feel like an echo chamber by the loudest while half the audience is just listening curiously in disbelief.

davidbarker2• 4 years ago

That’s true. The Clips/Replay (Clips being the ability to save a 30-second clip of the room and Replay being the ability to listen back to a whole room after it’s finished, for those who don’t know) was quite a big addition for a social network that seemed to have ephemerality as one of its big selling points. It’s difficult to know how it affected the app as it was added as the app had already started to lose users.

Was the room you mention based on the false information that the COVID vaccine causes you to be HIV+? I remember that was a talking point for a few weeks.

I agree — I really like the emoji responses you can give in a Twitter Space. Clubhouse does at least now have a chatroom for everyone in the room, including the audience, if the creator enables it.

TedShiller• 4 years ago

The reason Clubhouse didn't have staying power is that there its value proposition is hypocritical, and therefore doesn't work: On Clubhouse, it only matters who's talking (for example, Elon). It doesn't matter who's listening. The more important the speaker is, the more it is a one-to-many broadcasting platform, and the less it matters if it's live. That makes it as useful as podcasts, which is already a saturated space.

cmeacham98• 4 years ago

Even if I take your first statement to be true, I'm not sure the rest of the comment follows. If we look over at video content livestreaming is popular (and increasingly so). Why have companies like Twitch been successful enough to be bought by Amazon rather than losing to YouTube or similar? Is there something special about audio that video doesn't have?

chrisco255• 4 years ago

Yeah, audio is better suited for hands-free interaction, pseudo-anon interactions (which might be helpful for strangers talking to each other), much lower bandwidth requirements, etc. The ergonomics of audio is better, as there is no need to stay in frame. It also focuses the conversation more around what is being said rather than being distracted by someone's environment.

bibinou2• 4 years ago

Twitch is Amazon's hedge against Youtube, I won't say it was "successful" pre-acquisition.

United857• 4 years ago

Similar to Quora -- the hype was based on the initial exclusivity/SV celebrity factor. Once things opened up, average quality of content went way down.

jazzyjackson2• 4 years ago

Right, it's in the name, it worked when it was a club, you would run into celebrities, had a kind of back-stage or afterparty vibe. I came back a few months after quitting (I didn't like how blocking someone became a whole meta-drama since they could no longer speak in rooms you were speaking) -- couldn't find a single room worth hanging around in.

doggerel4042• 4 years ago

But quora is still around and very useful- maybe even more so than during the hype period

EEBio• 4 years ago

What kind of useful answers can be found on Quora these days?

saurik• 4 years ago

The core "problem" with live audio is that you are drinking straight from the source of information as it is produced. With Quora, there is a ton of drivel or even spam, but that useless content sits around for a while and gets filtered out by some combination of moderation, voting, and search rankings. In contrast, with Clubhouse, you are instead highly reliant on personalities who are building reputation by having a high signal to noise ratio, which doesn't scale once the whole world is involved.

Additionally, the high-value people on the platform are themselves often there because of the other high-value people. If most of the rooms you go to speak in are just filled with a thousand fans, maybe you'd be better off using that tile to talk to your half a million followers on Twitter or Instagram. The experience of a small private club simply doesn't scale.

ohashi• 4 years ago

I've found Quora to be just full of spam these days. They don't take the problem seriously at all. And they keep trying terrible and spammy incentivization tactics to keep people engaged.

miked85• 4 years ago

I agree that Quora is still around.

davidkuennen2• 4 years ago

I find Reddit to be much more useful these days when searching for answers.

misiti3780• 4 years ago

somehow Quora is still around though - how?

starwind• 4 years ago

It's big in India

cj• 4 years ago

A fairly large percent of my google searches contain answers from Quora on page 1. They’re playing the SEO game well.

And from that comes traffic, which I’m guessing they must be monetizing.

It’s the new “Yahoo Answers”

User232• 4 years ago

Just like the Internet. When getting online at all was an IQ test the discourse was stellar. Sadly September came and never went.

xwdv2• 4 years ago

It has died, they just don’t know it yet.

The network has now been poached to death by the typical influencer expert user looking to build a brand or grow some kind of following.

This happens to all new social networks now because new and novel marketing channels give the best ROI, and influencers want to suck these dry before users become harder to influence.

ThalesX• 4 years ago

A marketer friend recommended this guy, and I decided to give his book a read. The guy is Gary Vaynerchuk and the book is "Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence-and How You Can, Too".

It's been some time, but I can vividly remember his advice on exploring new social networks in order to generate ROI on new marketing channels. Basically what you are saying but with a lot of inferred 'bro' in the process.

jdrc• 4 years ago

They ran out of invites

cliftonk• 4 years ago

Clubhouse was a feature, not a product. It was completed displaced within days of the twitter spaces launch.

Kye5• 4 years ago

The crowd attracted to Clubhouse was mostly also on Twitter, so Twitter Spaces was a natural fit. I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter's purchase of and increasing integration with Revue has a similar impact on Substack for the same reason.

ChrisMarshallNY5• 4 years ago

I downloaded the app on my iPad, because someone told me it was the new hotness.

As soon as I started it, it was fixed to an iPhone window.

This was about a year ago. No apps should ever do that. It means the app is crap quality.

I nuked it, and forgot about it.

jonas212• 4 years ago

There are plenty of good reasons to dislike Clubhouse, but the lack of an iPad UI on day one is not one of them. When you're building something new, you have to prioritize, and insisting on polish like this just helps to entrench the big players.

ChrisMarshallNY5• 4 years ago

That’s not what I’m talking about. It’s easy to write an iOS app that can adapt to an iPad. If it doesn’t, then that means that some kind of outdated hybrid system was used, or they hired the absolute cheapest coders they could find, that used fearfully primitive techniques (or both).

I’ve been writing iOS apps for many years, and have never written one that doesn’t immediately adapt to an iPad. Even my cruddiest, written-in-two-hours test harnesses run on iPads without that ghastly “2X” button. Heck, my very first ObjC “hello world” app adapted to iPads. It’s pretty much built into the SDK.

TBH, I’m not even sure how to get the 2X to appear.

But it’s not my app, or my money. I just didn’t want to waste my time on a bad app. I doubt that I’m the reason they face-planted.

nebula88043• 4 years ago

I think Instagram does this to this very day? Your video is something not shared by all.

ChrisMarshallNY5• 4 years ago

I'm not sure that I'd hold up Instagram as an exemplar of good iOS apps. I've chatted with folks that worked on it.

laurex• 4 years ago

Side question: From a technical perspective, why was it iPhone-only for so long? Even Twitter Spaces still don't work on the web AFAIK despite having announced their intent to do so nearly a year ago.

meibo• 4 years ago

Rich and famous Americans don't use Android phones, so it added to the apparent exclusivity - I'm sure it's not much more than that, their actual VoIP tech was a SaaS and it's easy to assume that they didn't actually need Android customers at that point.

This isn't meant as a quip or sarcasm, it is actually what a lot of people thought back in its "golden age", reading through Twitter and other social networks. For a lot of people in the US, Android phone == poor, no taste. iPhones are status symbols.

AniseAbyss2• 4 years ago

iPhones are status symbols

I can agree with that and it is exactly why I never want one. Cheap Chinaphone, never paying for or subscribing to apps and not giving a shit about optics. That is my special snowflake fashion statement.

Nextgrid• 4 years ago

"Growth and engagement" doesn't pay the bills in a world already saturated with advertising.

mgamache• 4 years ago

Most high-quality speakers left the platform in 2021. The app has mostly degenerated into cliques. Rewarding the most click-bait titles, revenge rooms and acerbic personalities. There was no plan on sustaining growth or quality and it shows. I think by Feb 2022 the traffic was down 50% from it's 2021 height.

analogdreams• 4 years ago

it got overrun by woke nonsense and no one wants to listen to that.

mvkel• 4 years ago

Clubhouse was popular because influential people were on it, behind a wall. This meant if you were an early adopter, you had social capital.

The moment Clubhouse opened its doors to the gen pop, it was doomed.

AniseAbyss2• 4 years ago

Oh yeah that happened.

asteroidp• 4 years ago

It was a cutesy novelty that was invite only for iOS only and meant for the "elites" of silicone valley

JSONderulo• 4 years ago

This thread captured it https://twitter.com/ShaanVP/status/1371972261004070913

koolba• 4 years ago

That’s a really good summary / prediction.

My favorite line:

You vow to only work on enterprise saas for the rest of your career

digerata• 4 years ago

The worst part of all this is that clubhouse.io changed their name to some stupid thing that doesn't make any sense and they didn't need to. They could have just waited out the hype.

Schwolop• 4 years ago

I agree. The new name never stuck for me and I keep having to google what it changed to (Shortcut, FYI) so that I can find the bookmark to it.

jollybean• 4 years ago

They failed to bring in consistent good speakers.

The good stuff (i.e. An Atlantic writer, former ambassador, dude from think-tank) audience is too niche.

Discovery problem: you never know when good stuff is on.

Crap problem: so much hustle/culture BS.

They now have 'pre-recorded' sessions so you can listen in, which is very helpful.

But still a giant discovery problem.

I really enjoyed some content, but it's hard to find.

And big content makers want to get their stuff replayed, so the 'live' aspect is minimal.

I'm not sure if this model can work in the end.

jayzalowitz2• 4 years ago

This will probably get me canceled, but some of the most clear racism i've experienced was people from atlanta going off with a whole bunch of anti semitic stuff, I deleted my app that day and dont miss that.

diebeforei485• 4 years ago

- Covid vaccines and reopening means people can socialize in real life instead.

- Competition (Callin, Twitter Spaces). Callin has unique content. Twitter Spaces has far higher reach and engagement because people already have Twitter on their phone. Notably, Twitter wanted to acquire Clubhouse and Callin's investor wanted to invest in Clubhouse.

- There wasn't much focus on content quality. Large rooms need better moderation tools, etc.

- One of my favorite shows (Good Time) isn't on anymore. That was probably the most popular show, so it's perplexing.

ls15• 4 years ago

I assume that the initial hype was mostly paid for and then the payments stopped at some point, so the hype stopped too.

xaxaxb• 4 years ago

I remember Balaji and Naval promoting it so much (one founder is of Indian-origin I think) like it's just gonna break the entire social media industry and whatnot. A breakthrough.

Now they won't even mention it. I hate (and laugh) that they don't take a stand on what they promote. Their tweets so ephemeral. Yesterday it was Clubhouse, today it's bitcoin, tomorrow it's xyz. No spine. Just surviving via capitalism with hit or miss investments.

aborsy• 4 years ago

If you have a good idea and small business around it, how do you protect your business from big companies?

Because twitter literally took Clubhouse’s business.

davidkuennen2• 4 years ago

It's very hard if your product could be a feature.

"Dropbox is a feature, not a product" - Steve Jobs

geminicoolaf• 4 years ago

The hype has passed.

corobo• 4 years ago

From my point of view they remained too locked down after Twitter launched their version

The exclusive access model is a double edged sword apparently

Traster• 4 years ago

Right from the beginning Clubhouse felt like it was trying to Make Fetch Happen. There was the company itself - loudly shouting about how it was the future, their VC backers loudly shouting about how it was the future, and then a bunch of SV bros whose entire brands are caught up in being seen to be early adopters. So they all jump on it because they want to be seen to be early adopters, and scream about how they were in on the ground floor of The Next Big Thing. But the truth is that there was never any value proposition to it, all of the value the company was trying to claim in the early days was purely down to the celebrity guests who were never going to stay because they had no reason to let their value accrue to clubhouse.

The distinguishing feature of clubhouse wasn't live audio chats, it was Silicon Valley VCs hyping up a valueless app for completely self-interested reason.

There is also this really weird strain of investors in SV who have noticed that journalists have started covering some of the problems in by silicon valley and decided that they - billionaire business owners - are a persecuted minority who must be protected from these evil reporters. And you see from these guys a continual effort to try and replace online media with something they can control.

chucklenorris• 4 years ago

Well, people love podcasts so it promised to be a more informal podcast platform with user participation and no built in recording. It got hyped by artificial scarcity (the invitation system) and by celebrities dropping in (it's like a dinner party with Elon yay). It was never that good in the first place, just people from the outside feeling the fomo. And then the floodgates open and the scummy parts of society dropped in, mostly fuelled by the ephemeral aspect of the discussions: crypto scams, made up entrepreneurs with no product, hate speech of all shapes and color. It basically turned into 4chan. And then ofcourse the big names abandoned ship.

Ask HN: What happened to Clubhouse?

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