We'll of course have to wait and see, but I don't imagine that Clubhouse will be entirely displaced. What's unique about Clubhouse is not the concept of a Clubhouse room itself, which is essentially a Discord channel with basic moderation capabilities, but the community it has created. For the moment at least, Clubhouse is chock full of cool and influential people.
Clubhouse rooms range from typical seminars, to loosely moderated discussions, to essentially chat rooms. The cool thing is you run into people who have interesting stories and lives. For instance, attending a seminar on nuclear disarmament with New York Times reporters, public policymakers, and whatever random influential people show up to pop up on stage. Or attending a discussion on Tibet where Ai Wei Wei, Tibetan monks, and other dissidents pop in.
Another interesting product of Clubhouse is that it's opened a large forum for Chinese-language public discussion. Clubhouse is one of the very few online places I've seen people willing to speak frankly on sensitive political issues in Chinese, perhaps because Clubhouse rooms are (at least nominally) ephemeral, leaving no record. Even though Clubhouse is now blocked in China, a lot of this discussion is continuing, with voices on all sides of the political spectrum.
It started out with a bang (fanfare and huge celebrity usage), ended (well I guess Quora still exists...) with a whimper.
What made Quora special in the early days was the high-quality community. Smart questions, smart writers answering them, even a reasonable proportion of smart comments. That seems to be the same sort of magic that Clubhouse has managed. It's not the technology, it's the community.
But as Quora tried to scale, that got worse and worse. It wasn't a small set of staff doing moderation, but a wider group of volunteers. The average quality of the questions declined. Comments became more tiresome. A lot of people started writing answers not for the joy of it, but because Quora's larger platform provided them with a means to some personal end. Comments became more tiresome. Indeed, now one of the first search results I get for "Quora" now is an article titled "How to use Quora to power up your lead generation." Ugh.
I'll be really surprised if Clubhouse manages to avoid a similar fate. There's a very low barrier to entry.
Quora lends itself toward SEO spam. It's written word. Clubhouse currently isn't archived in a machine-readable format. This eliminates a decent 60% of the value for commercial purposes, and probably 30% will be taken care of by users having the common sense to avoid any overwhelmingly-obvious marketing.
Of course, it already is seemingly just a platform for aging capitalists and twitter users to "have discussions," which seems like shorthand for "advertise themselves." I couldn't call it good by any means. But that's more or less what every social media platform is, and not different than what you'd find anywhere else.
However, it seems unlikely it'll get much worse from here.
I also think it's a mistake to think that common sense will save us. Everybody has weaknesses, and any given scam is carefully optimized for its target audience.
Unfortunately.
Clubhouse is great right now and it seems to take far too long between “lightning strikes” of awesome communities.
Half the time the answers are actually very educational and the other half it's a Facebook-style reply where an old person yells at me because they misread the question.
The one exploitative thing I've noticed is there's a "partner program" that pays you to ask questions, but it seems impossible to make more than 10c off it in a lifetime.
I personally see maybe 1 blind dating room a week and only a couple NFT rooms in a 24 hour span.
There's a fundamental tension here. Cool and influential people want to hang out with other cool and influential people. Non-cool and non-influential people also want to hang out with cool and influential people. When you use your exclusivity to build popularity there's only one way it can play out. You can do it as slowly as possible or all in one big bang but it will happen.
This is more an effect of you being exposed to Chinese people rather than some new phenomenon. Mainland politics is everywhere online, it's in the digital spaces that Westerners rarely visit though.
百度贴吧 - https://tieba.baidu.com/
Probably the biggest platform out there. You can argue it's censored but then again the same arguments could be made about plenty of Western platforms who follow the moral mores of 2021. There's a lot of leetspeak to get around filters when talking about sensitive topics, translations aren't always great but if you find something particularly out of place maybe try checking for alt meanings.
There's >300 million active monthly users. Plenty of things you won't like in there.
Facebook style, mostly younger people.
Traditional type forum, mainly older people, certainly more patriotic.
If you want to only read opinions you are more amenable to and won't accuse of being bots/cybertroopers I'd suggest the forums that foreign mainlanders often use. Around East Asia and the bamboo network there's few popular places:
吹水台 - https://lihkg.com/
Cari, an example thread - https://cn.cari.com.my/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=4263651&...
Plenty I've missed surely.
Of course after arriving, I realized that a lot of what I saw is either aspirational or realistic only for a very small cross-section of American people.
And then there’s the avalanche of notification spam..,
I don't think that's a reasonable assumption since the invention of screen recorders, especially combined with Clubhouse's "real name" and a "real face" policy (I'm not sure if the latter is official policy or just a community convention, I'd be more worried about the former)
This is how I got in, through a friend I hadn't talked to in a while.
Giants can clone the entire product with a small team.
I'm worried about this exact problem.
Edit: First thought that comes to mind is filing a few patents and then throwing 50% of funding into a lawsuit against the first giant to clone you.
This is traditionally not the way, but with the incumbents so nimble and readily able to pick off good ideas, it seems like it might be the only defense.
The only people who threaten this are Facebook and Twitter. Twitter _actually_ could clone it or buy a competitor. But, look at Twitter’s history of that. They literally KILLED a TikTok by buying it and shutting it down. They are in the process of killing a live video competitor to twitch and youtube called periscope.
Don’t be afraid of The Big Bois.
Facebook does a damn good job of sinking ships.
The only two survivors I can think of are TikTok and Snapchat. And Snapchat pivoted.
the ones you’re referring to were social photo/video plays which FB was perfectly setup to enter. FB doesn’t have an audio product as far as i know.
Giants are more likely to buy the entire project with a small amount of shares
Neither option is likely to turn out well, but at least the founders could be rewarded
I’ve been on Clubhouse for over two months now; it’s very polished for a beta app and the community it has attracted is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced and I’ve been online since the BBS days of the 80s and everything since then.
The $100 million they raised from a16z gives them the runway to do things right. I see the copies shutting down before in their attempts to displace Clubhouse.
Now there is a difference between a platform that takes 15-30% cut and <5% but I really don’t see how they’ll be able to operate.
And this ofc goes beyond the fact as you mentioned that the big players can simply kill this by having a similar policy especially for smaller creators.
The only purpose of clubhouse that I can think off is if that’s exactly their plan in the first place.
The only other thing I can think off is if they’ll offer a content discovery platform and then charge creators to promote their content on the system but that’s arguably a worse off deal for creators since they’ll have to put in money upfront without any guarantee of returns.
> 100% of the payment will go to the creator. The person sending the money will also be charged a small card processing fee, which will go directly to our payment processing partner, Stripe. Clubhouse will take nothing.
Yeah, it’s interesting how very few people know about the ways payment frauds take place.
An analogy I can think of is highways. A non trivial number of vehicles plying them are carrying illegal goods. Payments is similar, when you set up a path for money to flow between A and B the very first users to adopt that path are money launderers.
Ohhh, this is going to be a disaster for Manufactured Spend.
I’m aware of lots of Android users who have bought used iPhones or are using their kid’s iPod Touch to access Clubhouse.
https://www.notion.so/Community-Guidelines-461a6860abda41649...
I've spoken with people from all over the world, including those in developing countries, in Clubhouse rooms.
The days of only wealthy westerners having iPhones has long past.
Well imagine if they had an Android app in the first place or earlier right before all the big players started copying them, then it would have been attractive to the users. Right now, what is the point if the invite system is still there.
Another platform can just announce the same thing and they are back to square zero.
> We are excited to see how people use it, and to continue working hard to help the amazing members of the Clubhouse community grow and thrive.
Yet, with no Android app and an increasing amount of competitors copying the hell out of Clubhouse, I can only see this going in the way of Meerkat, Yik Yak and Periscope. (By being shut down)