The (possible) irony is that ClubHouse uses Agora behind the scenes to power its real-time audio. that’s a Chinese company based in Mainland China. I’d be careful if I was them. The double irony is that I believe Agora is blocked behind TGF.

Excellent point. There are apparently already Clubhouse bots as well, and it would be trivial to record audio using one (although you'd need a bot per room you want to record). It's probably very difficult to recognize Clubhouse bots as well, since you probably don't need that many of them, at least with Clubhouse's current scale, to record all the interesting big political discussions.

I think the usual abbreviation is GFW not TGF

And yet you still knew what they were referring to :)

This is something that is swappable if they're concerned about it. The brand, however, is not.

Will they be responsible enough to care about it before it becomes a problem? Proactive infrastructure upgrades are not a strong suit of most "hip" startups.

My prediction (based on little evidence, just gut feeling) is Clubhouse will go the way of Quora.

It started out with a bang (fanfare and huge celebrity usage), ended (well I guess Quora still exists...) with a whimper.

As a former Quora Top Writer (2013 and 2014), that makes a lot of sense to me. And faster, I'd bet.

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.

But "lead generation" is the fate of all social networks. It may be cool at the beginning, but very soon marketers will figure out how to use it for commercial purposes, and this will become 90% of the use. It is the same story on Facebook, Pinterest, and so many others.

Yup. User-generated content is prized by social networks because it's free to acquire. But over time, you get what you pay for.

I don't have/don't want a Clubhouse account (it seems like a very cringe-inducing platform for people past their prime), but I actually think you're wrong.

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'm not saying that SEO spam will be clubhouse's problem. But there are more kinds of marketing than SEO. The "investment seminar" scam, for example, has been running for decades in the real world.

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.

But that's already happening on it! It therefore wouldn't be dropping in quality from where it already is!

Your theory is that there's no way for the proportion of low-quality content to increase?

Correct, because it's all pretty much low-quality content by most standards.

Any platform that 'recommends' content on the basis of user behaviour is going to incentivize spam. Clubhouse is new so maybe that's not there yet. The spammers will only open the floodgates once the audience is big enough.

My instinct says you’re exactly on track.

Unfortunately.

Clubhouse is great right now and it seems to take far too long between “lightning strikes” of awesome communities.

This is my feeling as well; Quora had the same feel when it was launched and now it's basically worthless with people only posting to promote their product/business.

I've found Quora pretty active, but I just use it to offhandedly ask dumb questions like "if Easter is so good why isn't there a Wester" whenever I think of them.

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.

There are cool and influential people on Clubhouse, for sure. I listened to and participated in very interesting conversations. The vast majority of Clubhouse though is shady NFT talks, literally blind dating, and shameless self promotion by countless “coaches”, “facilitators”, and “DJs”. I do not have a good feeling about it.

“Majority” is a tricky term here since the hallways are so subjective and the recommendation engines are in flux.

I personally see maybe 1 blind dating room a week and only a couple NFT rooms in a 24 hour span.

> For the moment at least, Clubhouse is chock full of cool and influential people.

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.

> Clubhouse is one of the very few online places I've seen people willing to speak frankly on sensitive political issues in Chinese

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.

What are some of these platforms? Would love to know

I get the feeling whatever I provide is going to be criticised, regardless, here goes:

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.

人人 - https://www.renren.com/

Facebook style, mostly younger people.

天涯 - http://www.tianya.cn/

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.

What's the best way to keep up with modern Chinese culture for someone in the Anglosphere? Is Avocado Toast a big thing among millennials in China? Is there (was there) any Hipster movement in China? To what extent does Western culture penetrate China and what are the latest fads or fashions?

Maybe you could watch their TV and movies? I've lived outside my country of birth for most of my life, so that's how I learned about American culture before moving there.

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.

Would love to hear examples of other platforms.

I’ve found the total opposite. Most things I’ve listened to have eventually turned into a sales pitch. It’s almost like clubhouse is infomercials with listeners calling in.

And then there’s the avalanche of notification spam..,

> 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.

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)

Speaking of community and having 'influencers' on it, I would bet it takes more the route of Quora which once upon a time you could say similar things. But it's a complete shit hole now.

I don't even recall a time when Quora wasn't basically Yahoo Answers.

But isn't it invite only?

You can create an account even without an invite. If you give it access to your contacts, your friends will get a notification to invite you, if they have an invite to give. Once you get an invite, your account will be activated, and you can use Clubhouse.

This is how I got in, through a friend I hadn't talked to in a while.

That’s an interesting way to scrape people’s connections and phone numbers.

It's been done before. I consider it a passive dark pattern.