Clubhouse clones are coming

The most praised and hyped aspects ("novel"/nice community, opportunities to listen to certain celebrities) were never anything inherent to Clubhouse. They were side effects of clubhouse being gated and hip among a certain crowd at the same time. Clubhouse fans can talk about their cool encounters on there all they want, it isn't something that was ever going to last more than a few weeks/months.

Jobs offered to buy them in 2009 when AAPL stock was around $5 a share (obviously a lot of splits happened), compared to today's price of over $120 so that $1B in stock would be around $25B, more than double Dropbox market cap

From the linked thread:

> When a user opens an app (IG, youtube, TikTok) they need juicy content within 7 seconds (or they bounce). This is the "Interesting-ness" problem.

> Those other apps (IG, Tiktok etc.) have millions of pieces of content to choose from. So their algorithms get really really good at finding juicy content for you right away. But clubhouse is LIVE. So you need something INTERESTING that's ALSO happening RIGHT NOW.

> multiplying "content is interesting" and "content is live" doesn't just make the problem 2x harder..it makes it 200x harder.

The interesting thing is that Twitter Spaces solves all of this organically. No interesting Space content? Well, you were already there to scroll through your feed, so you can get your dopamine hit just by doing that anyways. Notifications can take advantage of your entire interest graph, not just your contact list and Clubhouse-specific opt-ins.

I've spent significant time in Twitter Spaces. The UX is practically identical. Panel discussions are equally professional. There's naturally going to be more professional content because people can justify spending time to build a Twitter following WAY more than they can justify spending time to build a Clubhouse following. When Twitter launched Fleets I thought it was a massive waste of screen real estate having them as a position:sticky-esque element, but Spaces live there as well, and it flips the equation on its head: you want to stay up-to-date with the spaces that are going on at any time, so it makes total sense for spaces to be top-of-screen and top-of-mind.

And while there may be some who are afraid of linking their Twitter presence to the frank thoughts they might want to share... Clubhouse IMO is even worse on this, because the insistence on real identities prevents an entire class of pseudonymous discussion from happening, and it's only a place people can feel safe to say controversial things while it's a relatively small invite-only community, which works counter to the growth trend. Not to mention opening to pseudonymous accounts enables voice-only acting as fictional characters, which will democratize the Virtual Youtuber trend in a huge way.

Assuming Twitter can stick to an April release, I fear Clubhouse will be spoken of with the same historical reverence we use for Digg, and the same meteoric two-year lifespan of Pets.com.

It definitely seems to be. I just opened the app right now and the room titles I see are:

"Breakfast w/ Champions the Millionaire's Breakfast Club"

"Money vs Passion: Big Entrepreneurs Open Up"

"Welcome to Clubhouse! Get +1000 followers, likes, and comments"

"NFTs for Dummies"

"SuperDuper Coin takes over CRYPTO!! Less than $0.01!"

"Big Instagram Room: Marketing 101"

"Rising Affirmations"

"NFTs tips 2 Month Anniversary get your POAP"

"Marketing and Selling NFTs"

"BOSS MOMS: Branding Like a Boss"

"DAILY WORKSHOP: Reclaim your passion"

That's just a snippet, surprised to not see more around NFTs, and you can imagine there's rocket and star emojis strewn throughout all those titles. I basically stopped logging into clubhouse. There are some good conversations here and there in my areas of interest (none of the above) but even in those people are just preening to get "on stage" and when they talk say nothing of substance "let's take a step back here and think about X" or "where do we draw the line?" seem to be the go-to phrases of someone who has nothing tangible to say about the topic.

I would welcome a Clubhouse type startup with actually vetted people that eschewed topics/influencers or which didn't attempt to expand. Like, cap Clubhouse new members 6 months ago and that would have been an amazing app with lots of interesting and successful people talking about interesting topics without all the noise.

That tweet captures why I began building async audio-chat in a slack-like app last year: https://heysync.chat

It's very exciting to see that they finally 'get it' too -- that feeling, that this is something discovered more than invented, is exactly what drove my initial interest in the idea.