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Clubhouse is the big stinker that nobody wants to talk about

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Re: Clubhouse is the big stinker that nobody wants to talk about

#41

Post by todd3834 »

derangedHorse wrote: post #33
todd3834 wrote: post #24

This was a very well written article on this person’s opinion backed with some, in my opinion, sketchy data points. As I read it, I couldn’t help but to feel a little cringy like reading a gossip magazine. Sorry to be off topic but what motivates someone to write an entire article to prove to everyone that a startup sucks. The very fact that they felt compelled to try to convince people the startup isn’t relevant all…

The motivation for writing this post is the same as the motivation for any post —- it’s an interesting story. It seems like you might be taking offense from a post that’s just trying to analyze a case where the perceived hype, and the underlying assumptions for the reason for the perceived hype, were disassociated from the actual numbers seen during the general release of the app.

That’s a fair point. I’m not taking offense but I did feel cringy reading it. I did think it was well written.

Re: Clubhouse is the big stinker that nobody wants to talk about

#42

Post by achenatx »

tomhoward wrote: post #9

I joined CH in January, and I initially felt the same sense of excitement I felt when I first joined Twitter in early 2008 and started connecting with new, likeminded people. But that excitement died off within about two weeks, once I realised how little really interesting discussion there was. There were some highlights, and I still dip in now and again when a compelling name pops up, but it's mostly pretty uninspir…

there are certain patterns that have been true with communication media over a long period of time. You can see that all electronic forms of communication follow these patterns. There is immediate/delayed, one way communication, two way communication, communication with a single person, communication with a group, written, spoken, and visual. You can form combinatorics with these options and find historical examples for all of them.

1) written one way communication to single(e.g. mail, email)

2) written one way communication to audience (e.g. newspapers, blogs, online news)

3) written two way communication - immediate (e.g. notes passed in class, telegram, instant message, slack)

4) written two way communication delayed (e.g. mail, forums, reddit)

5) spoken one way communication to one - delayed (e.g. message passed to a friend, answering machine voice message, voice mail)

6) spoken one way communication to many (e.g. speech, radio, podcast )

7) spoken two way communication to many (e.g. meeting, talk radio, phone party lines)

etc etc

Re: Clubhouse is the big stinker that nobody wants to talk about

#43

Post by sunstone »

codethief wrote: post #35
tomhoward wrote: post #9

I joined CH in January, and I initially felt the same sense of excitement I felt when I first joined Twitter in early 2008 and started connecting with new, likeminded people. But that excitement died off within about two weeks, once I realised how little really interesting discussion there was. There were some highlights, and I still dip in now and again when a compelling name pops up, but it's mostly pretty uninspir…

> I heard him make the claim that Clubhouse has bigger potential than text-based social platforms, because talking has less friction than writing Finding people that talk about stuff is one thing, finding people who like to listen to other people talking is the other. Unfortunately, listening has much higher friction than reading.

On the other hand both YouTube channels and podcasts have found a spoken audience. And YouTube is often just someone(s) talking (eg PBS Space Time) that could easily be a podcast.

Re: Clubhouse is the big stinker that nobody wants to talk about

#44

Post by TacticalCoder »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #15
Havoc wrote: post #2

Not just clubhouse. I get the impression that a few of the major apps are dying. FB - nobody really seems to be posting anymore. Insta - two people actively posting on my feed (I think, hard to tell under all the ads pretending to be posts). Twitter and tiktok appear to be holding their own though. Seen more "delete twitter" sentiment lately though

> FB - nobody really seems to be posting anymore. Insta - two people actively posting on my feed Their actual engagement numbers across the general population are quite good. This sounds more representative of your bubble using different platforms than the general state of the app.

> Their actual engagement numbers across the general population are quite good.

I got to see how teenagers were spending way too much time on their smartphone this summer: it was all tiktok and instagram, some twitch, and absolutely zero FB. To them FB is their parents' platform. Their parents are my friends and in my friends group nearly everybody stopped posting on FB. My father (74 y/o now) was at some point relentlessly posting on FB. He got tired of that and never uses the site anymore.

I remember when FB was big, really big, among my friends and family. Now it's a complete wasteland.

I don't dispute that their numbers "across the general population" are good but I just don't see where it's coming from. What's the age group still using FB? For what? Doing what?

WhatsApp and Instagram, sure, people are using that a huge lot: I see that all around me. But FB? Who's still using FB? I just don't see it. Among my friends and family across several groups of age it's as good as dead.

Once in a very rare while (once a year?) I log in to see if I got a private message. Then I check various long lost friends to see if they posted anything new and I see the same old picture they posted years and years ago: nothing new since. If anything people actively remove old pictures.

I don't see people around me just abandoning FB: I see them abandoning it in drones and covering their tracks by deleting past posts / pictures.

Now I'm not worried for FB the company: with WhatsApp and Instagram I'm sure they're doing fine.

> This sounds more representative of your bubble using different platforms

Sure but we're quite some to have our "bubbles" behaving the same way.

Re: Clubhouse is the big stinker that nobody wants to talk about

#45

Post by ta988 »

tomhoward wrote: post #9

I joined CH in January, and I initially felt the same sense of excitement I felt when I first joined Twitter in early 2008 and started connecting with new, likeminded people. But that excitement died off within about two weeks, once I realised how little really interesting discussion there was. There were some highlights, and I still dip in now and again when a compelling name pops up, but it's mostly pretty uninspir…

I had the same experience with lunchclub.

Re: Clubhouse is the big stinker that nobody wants to talk about

#48

Post by matco11 »

For me Clubhouse worked for a few weeks, not a few days… I haven’t used it for the past few months, but I think it’s just a matter of time before they figure things out to make it more usable again:

1) I feel the growth in the number of users (and rooms) has overwhelmed their notifications-based system;

2) the “enjoy the live conversation or nothing” approach they have works great for content creators (which is key), and for people that enjoy serendipity (which is great), but makes it hard to use for many users that may just want to enjoy the content and are not in creator mode at all times.

A lot of the great stuff that happens on CH just happens at the wrong time of the day.

Adding DMs was a great way to help translate participation in rooms into something more valuable and that continues to bring value beyond (outside) CH.

I suspect next steps are going to be in the direction of:

1) supporting the many people that would be willing to trade interactivity in a room for greater flexibility to listen to it passively but at any time;

2) introducing a content recommendation system that allows users to discover the right content that is not live;

3) bring on a user rating system that relies on more than just the number of followers.

Re: Clubhouse is the big stinker that nobody wants to talk about

#49

Post by jasode »

codethief wrote: post #35
tomhoward wrote: post #9

I joined CH in January, and I initially felt the same sense of excitement I felt when I first joined Twitter in early 2008 and started connecting with new, likeminded people. But that excitement died off within about two weeks, once I realised how little really interesting discussion there was. There were some highlights, and I still dip in now and again when a compelling name pops up, but it's mostly pretty uninspir…

> I heard him make the claim that Clubhouse has bigger potential than text-based social platforms, because talking has less friction than writing Finding people that talk about stuff is one thing, finding people who like to listen to other people talking is the other. Unfortunately, listening has much higher friction than reading.

>Unfortunately, listening has much higher friction than reading.

Sure, for a minority of consumers like yourself.

However, for most people that make up the mass audience... they do not like to read long-form text whether it is articles in Vanity Fair, The Atlantic or books.

Yes, people would rather read the text of a temperature and weather forecast on their smartphone -- instead of listen to a long-winded presentation by a tv news meteorologist. But when we compare apples-to-apples of long-form high word count type of content, an audio medium for listening is preferred by mass consumers.

Most would prefer hearing Joe Rogan and his guest speak rather than reading 50000+ word transcripts of a 3 hour conversation. Likewise, talk radio is very popular and has higher audience counts than the circulation numbers of long-form magazines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-listened-to_radio...

Also, reading has its own "frictions" because text is missing tonal inflection, length of pauses, deadpan vs incredulous delivery, etc.

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