Ask HN: What happened to Clubhouse?

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.

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).