Discord is already launching "Stages" which aims to replicate Clubhouse's main selling point. And I'm sure Twitter, Facebook, and Microsoft are gunning for them too. I have trouble seeing how they survive.

The Jobs offer was $1B IIRC; they’ve got a $12B market cap and some reasonable ROI far beyond the acquisition offer by now (remember even the IPO investors - non-retail - bought in at $21).

Whether the total ROI exceeds the growth / rate of return in AAPL stock during that time, well, maybe not? But it would have been a cash transaction...

By that logic most companies should have dissolved and simply bought AAPL shares with their proceeds (I mean that’s true up to some limit but it falls apart in some macroeconomic sense obviously).

I feel like both Steve can have been right, and Dropbox successful because it chose to do more than just be a feature.

I don't like CH because I don't like anything that only caters to "elites" and select groups. IMO, that goes against the very purpose of the Internet.

> 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.

The exact opposite for me. Their points are interesting, but to me the format just felt like a very poor attempt at creative writing. The first ~10 tweets convey absolutely no useful information. They only "set the scene".

I can see how others do find it entertaining though.