Ask HN: What happened to Clubhouse?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

You mean that iPhone advertisement?

Pandemic ⤵ Clubhouse ⤵ NFT ⤵

I call it the #Clubhouse Correlation.

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

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

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

Does anybody remember the app Yo?

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...

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

what is clubhouse?

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.

- 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.

i think twitter spaces.

The hype has passed.

Remember Vero?

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

They ran out of invites

Oh yeah that happened.