Clubhouse for X – The emerging trend of audio-only applications(forum.ei2030.org) |
Clubhouse for X – The emerging trend of audio-only applications(forum.ei2030.org) |
The rooms I did listen in on seemed to be full of people promoting themselves to each other. Most seemed like almost caricatures of Bay Area VC or entrepreneur types, or the most left-leaning Twitterati. I just kept asking myself, who would want to listen or engage with this?
Clearly I'm the minority as it seems to be blowing up.
After a major sporting or political event, a lot of people tune into News to listen to expert opinion. For sporting events, people even want to see what other fans are saying. You can see an explosion of activity in related subs on reddit: For example, r/tennis during ATP 1000+ events, or r/soccer every weekend.
There's always drama and there's always an urge to find out what others are thinking right at the moment; or in a few cases, the urge to share what you are thinking, as well.
I've been on r/tennis many a time to know how much redditors complain that the expert analysis post-match or the commentary during the match wasn't any good, and that they'd rather prefer some other commentator who's unfortunately not employed by the Network that owns broadcast rights in their country.
I believe clubhouse is an interesting clone of Reddit, Twitter / Instagram, and YouTube.
I imagine Clubhouse Live where folks listen to experts chime in real-time as events unfold; Clubhouse Roundtables where experts invite themselves and aren't beholden to the Media companies selecting the panels; Clubhouse Stations where folks tune in to listen to "Networks" broadcasting high-quality content.
The key innovation is Clubhouse is voice-only: Voice is faster and substantially low effort than text. With voice (unlike with video), there's substantially less pressure and more comfort.
You're right that as the community grows, it'd keep getting harder to surface quality content, but that's a good problem to have and almost every major Social media has that but are doing just fine. I hope Clubhouse doesn't turn grow to be as disappointing as Quora has.
I'm not so sure about the 'experts' yet, but I saw rooms spring up around the storming of the Capitol as well as for numerous Premier League football matches so far (I follow quite a few Brits though).
|The rooms I did listen in on seemed to be full of people promoting themselves to each other.
It must be very tiring to have social interactions like that all the time...
Frankly though, I can't stand a lot of the attitudes from the SF/SV area either. There's a lot of self-righteousness and self-signed certificates of moral authority in that crowd. I'm not a fan. People are allowed to see the world differently, and for most of the things I believe are right, I won't pretend to be so certain of my the moral absoluteness of my beliefs to insist anyone who disagrees is inherently less intelligent, wrong, or beneath me but that seems to be the status quo in the Bay.
First impression is that it's nice that people talk longer, don't cut each other off as much as in other debates, etc. but it definitely sounds like mostly berlin tech entrepreneurs & VCs (and some tech-adjacent politicians/journalists/...) at this point, and the "diversity" on panels is somewhat superficial (people from mildly different backgrounds who think alike vs. people from whatever background with deeper differences in viewpoints). That being said I also randomly ended up in a room with improvised music & poetry, so there do seem to be different things going on.
I can see myself using this if the content diversifies further into different topics, e.g. I'd enjoy loose discussions about e.g. academic / more technical topics, etc. For now it sounds mostly like your run of the mill panel discussion at a big tech conf., which can be inspiring for a bit but not everyday.
One thing to avoid is following all of the default suggested people. This really messed up my feed. Once I cleaned it up, happier times followed.
As far as politics it doesn't seem as left-wing as Twitter, I haven't seen any socialists or communists yet. I've seen a lot of standard liberal types but then also people with idiosyncratic politics (Black people who think BLM is a Soros conspiracy for example).
It’s kind of liberating! Makes you consider the physicality of the device itself in entirely new ways. Recommended!
https://www.joinclubhouse.com/check-1-2-3
I note that while one of its main claimed aims is to encourage diversity, it is Apple only...
Relevant project (mine): https://audiblogs.com (lets you listen to any blog posts in your podcast player. It's like Audible for blogs.)
But, nothing annoys me more than when I'm looking for how to do something (let's say fix my refrigerator), and I have to watch/skip around a 10 minute youtube video then pause so I can see the picture and then listen to bits over and over to understand what I need to do. Maybe I'm just old, but a few pics and text description would be so much easier.
I fell off for a little while as I realized my feed getting pretty echo chamber like. Then I started seeing extremely interesting conversations pop up such as the main PM on Google’s Alpha Fold answering questions live about the technology. Most recently the mayors of SF, Austin, Miami, and Seattle were on talking about the massive swell movement of tech between these ecosystems. They were taking questions from a live audience.
There is something magical going on here. My two cents.
It’s worse than physical meetings as the camera is always on.
Audio on the other hand let’s you focus on just the speaker. And what they are saying. No fancy UI to distract. No looking at the bookshelf in the speakers background. Just audio.
I love reading but am audio book while I mow the lawn offers two experiences at the same time. More time.
Interestingly the person who bumped me up appears to have had an outsized effect on which rooms I see.
One thing I've noticed: If one of my contacts signs up for the waitlist, I can give them access w/o using up one of my two invites, so it might be that they just relaxed the exclusiveness on that front to push it.
If they get big enough to justify a bigger more diverse dev team I'm sure they'll get around to a web version as well if they can deliver the same experience on web.
I'm building an app, and being able to deliver a better experience when selecting an image/video to upload was a consideration and one reason why I didn't use a mobile site and instead went with an app.
Push notifications are another big appeal of apps vs. a website, although I know that has changed somewhat recently it probably won't cause any massive shift in mobile site development.
Oh, and tracking :)