Finding people that talk about stuff is one thing, finding people who like to listen to other people talking is the other. Unfortunately, listening has much higher friction than reading.
Sure, for a minority of consumers like yourself.
However, for most people that make up the mass audience... they do not like to read long-form text whether it is articles in Vanity Fair, The Atlantic or books.
Yes, people would rather read the text of a temperature and weather forecast on their smartphone -- instead of listen to a long-winded presentation by a tv news meteorologist. But when we compare apples-to-apples of long-form high word count type of content, an audio medium for listening is preferred by mass consumers.
Most would prefer hearing Joe Rogan and his guest speak rather than reading 50000+ word transcripts of a 3 hour conversation. Likewise, talk radio is very popular and has higher audience counts than the circulation numbers of long-form magazines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-listened-to_radio...
Also, reading has its own "frictions" because text is missing tonal inflection, length of pauses, deadpan vs incredulous delivery, etc.
Not a clubhouse user, genuinely curious.
I'm guessing it's the sense that users get to participate as well (probably more than a normal stream or Twitch stream) which interests people, the value proposition is being able to contribute to a Joe Rogan podcast as a roundtable discussion instead of just listening to it.
It also allows you to promote your audience to speakers so it’s more of an interactive podcasts, so you can actually ask questions to a panel or the speaker.
Again, haven’t used it much but this is what I understand Clubhouse brings to the table.
That sounds like shirking the responsibility of not wasting the listener's time, i.e. lowering the barrier to production at the cost of raising the friction of consumption. For the app to be popular to use — rather than just popular to publish on — wouldn't you want the opposite?
Or, to put that another way: wouldn't "an edited recording of a talk recorded on Clubhouse, posted to YouTube" become a more popular way to consume Clubhouse content, than actually going on Clubhouse? And would this not kill any hope Clubhouse would have of ever monetizing, since there would be no users on the app itself to ever show ads to?
(I think this is truly the thing that really did "kill" Vine, in the end: there was no reason for most people — who are not, themselves, performers — to engage with Vines on Vine, when they could just engage with Vine compilations on YouTube. The creators saw the writing on the wall and sold it. TikTok came up with a better model, "democratizing" Vine's professionally-produced-funny-6-second-clip model into the much more widely-engaged-with "clip of a pretty person being silly with platform-licensed music in the background" model.)
This is why I don't consume podcasts. If it's worth saying, then it's worth making a transcript, which I can skim (or top-and-tail) in a tenth of the time it takes to listen to the whole thing.
Popehat was a blog that I used to visit regularly. Then Ken decided he was too busy to write, and most of his content is now some unscripted podcast - the blog now gets maybe a couple of posts a year, apart from the links to his podcasts.
Did that work out? All I know about clubhouse in this regard is stuff you you can find at google searches for e.g. "clubhouse misogynist", "clubhouse racist", "clubhouse anti-semitic"
I have never been there, and part of the reason is the reputation that it has from afar be being the opposite of "kind".
Wikipedia entry for "Clubhouse (app)" says as much in para 2.
Maybe, being not anonymous isn't a cure-all for bad behaviour. After all, there were racists before they could be anonymous online.
I'm not sure there's an exact parallel of "creator" in the Clubhouse paradigm. I'm not a Clubhouse user so my info is 2nd-hand based on how others describe it but this is my understanding of its original differentiation from podcast platforms and Youtube.
Consider the scenario of:
- Interesting Person A is not a podcast host or content producer. Person A also does not write text articles and opinion pieces in magazines or newspapers.
- Interesting Person B is also not a podcast producer.
- Person A and Person B can talk to each other in a public performance setting on an adhoc basis with audience interaction. Yes, Youtube livestream can also have multiple talking heads but that's video. With Clubhouse being audio, it lowers the barrier for participants who are ok with speaking but don't want to be seen.
- this means "interesting" people who are not podcasters like CEO Tesla Elon Musk can talk to CEO Robinhood Vladimir Tenev in a public forum which attracts an audience. Neither are of them are the "host" or the "guest" in a traditional sense. Neither have to set up a podcast or "upload" their conversation.
That was the original hype with it. The exclusive "invite-only" of famous people created buzz. Maybe the COVID lockdown and bored consumers looking for new entertainment helped boost its initial audience count. However, that doesn't mean the idea of scaling that up by "letting everybody in" ... a.k.a. "The Eternal September" makes Clubhouse more valuable. It seems to have the opposite effect.
This can be entertaining for a bit, but after a while turns into an unstructured dialog ... nice for a fan base and their star, but not for people who want to consume information or entertainment as content.
A good moderator can ensure a conversation works and serves the audience.
> Neither have to set up a podcast or "upload" their conversation.
That's the job of specialists. Like radio or podcast producers. Those also ensure that the audio is of usable quality.
There certainly is a room for adhoc conversations, both with famous people as well as within peer groups, though.
Beyond engaging with blog posts, or podcasts, or Twitch-style livestreams, the real #1 way people are consuming long-form content these days, is serialized — i.e. as "tweetstorms" or their AV equivalent in Instagram/TikTok. Pre-prepared, granularized "bites" of a long-form piece, that are pushed out one-at-a-time — and engaged with one-at-a-time between other things, as time permits, if you're consuming them "live" — but which also permit/encourage all-at-once consumption if you find them after-the-fact.
There is a reason people use Twitter for blogging, rather than "just having a blog." And that reason is that readers are able to concurrently engage with several ongoing text threads at once, if presented serialized in this manner, in a way that they would find harder to, if presented long-form, or impossible, if presented in a higher-engagement medium like voice or video.
And when readers are able to concurrently engage with several ongoing threads at once, they become willing to consume threads that, in a "consume all-at-once" medium, would never be able to "win" their full attention. Authors can settle for being the thing everyone is scheduling into their #2 or #3 or #5 attention-slot, rather than their #1 attention-slot, and still get engagement based on that.
0. https://www.thelily.com/women-in-tech-are-networking-through... - there are more if you Google around but this was the first thing that came up and I recall reading something similar.
Clubhouse’s demise seems to come from entering such a mature space without much of a marketing budget, then. Not enough extroverts know about it to keep the app interesting 24/7 and not much incentive to keep returning to talk on it as well.
I was comparing it to Twitter, Facebook and (original) Instagram, etc, in which a much greater proportion of users are posting content rather than just consuming.
It's the having time to think about what you're writing/posting that makes people more comfortable posting on those platforms. And of course you can hide behind an avatar on those platforms too.
https://www.clubhouse.com/room/xq7bKDed
Listening to people babble incessantly about shit they don't understand might suck, but being able to follow your favorite independent musicians (or poets or whatever) around the various open mic nights or invited performances they do to listen to them playing live music in different audience contexts might be more fun. I happened to follow a musician on Clubouse whom I was(/am) sponsoring on Patreon, and it was fun getting notifications "Kris Angelis is now playing" every now and then (and before anyone tries to assert as such, no: you can't replace this experience with following her YouTube account, which I also do, for the same reasons people play open mic nights in real life rather than either always doing concerts or simply selling CDs; the Clubhouse mechanism surrounds following individual people, not shows, through shared experiences that generally would be inappropriate to attach to your own feed... YouTube could try to add this--"someone you follow was tagged in this uploaded video" and "someone you follow is right now appearing in this live video"--but the mechanism is non-obvious since they don't do the muxing and is anyway very different from their current experience).
I would have thought, and still do think, similarly about YouTube and video vs. reading:
Who wants to Google the answer to something simple and instead of taking 30 seconds to read it, spend 12 minutes watching a YouTuber to eventually maybe see the answer read to you.
“The answer may surprise you” … everyone, apparently.
I don’t have to understand it or get it, I just have to accept that a huge chunk of today’s audience would rather spend 10x longer to receive information visually through a tiny embedded video postcard than quickly read it for themselves. So I have to design product experiences accordingly, not just for kids, but for adult enterprise employees too.
In a way this is true, those who don't know how to read or write also can use a talk only app.
But talking BS also has less friction ... so there will be more noise than signal I presume.
Pandemic has played a definitive role in the growth of Clubhouse, it would be interesting to see how it pans out after people get on to regular activities because they are generally shy to speak to their phones in public as compared to speaking on their phones.
But this varies according to the cultures.
Learnt this after launching couple of voice based apps in circa 2016, It saw huge activity from China when their appstores took our app from playstore and published it on them. Rest of the world didn't use the app much. Diging into this phenomenon I found that voice messages were even preferred over text in China at time.
1) written one way communication to single(e.g. mail, email)
2) written one way communication to audience (e.g. newspapers, blogs, online news)
3) written two way communication - immediate (e.g. notes passed in class, telegram, instant message, slack)
4) written two way communication delayed (e.g. mail, forums, reddit)
5) spoken one way communication to one - delayed (e.g. message passed to a friend, answering machine voice message, voice mail)
6) spoken one way communication to many (e.g. speech, radio, podcast )
7) spoken two way communication to many (e.g. meeting, talk radio, phone party lines)
etc etc
This is exacerbated by the real name policy clubhouse has. Maybe there's room for an anonymous voice chat app?
But that excitement died off within about two weeks, once I realised how little really interesting discussion there was. There were some highlights, and I still dip in now and again when a compelling name pops up, but it's mostly pretty uninspiring.
I was listening to the Good Time Show last week with CH co-founder Paul Davison talking about opening up to all comers, and I heard him make the claim that Clubhouse has bigger potential than text-based social platforms, because talking has less friction than writing, therefore more people will use a talk-based app. I've heard others make this claim before, and it's always struck me as a deeply flawed thesis.
Sure, most people are comfortable spending plenty of time chatting with one person or a small group of trusted people, but far fewer people are comfortable talking in a large group of strangers.
The confidence threshold is much much lower for text and photo-based platforms, as you have time to craft your content and you can always (where supported) edit or just delete post if you have second thoughts.
But public talk-based platforms trigger all the same fear-reactions that live public speaking triggers, so far fewer people are comfortable doing it, and hence we get exactly what we see – a platform dominated by a relatively small number of outlier extraverts/confident speakers.
I keep thinking: Andreessen Horowitz aren't stupid investors, they must have thought of this and must be working with the founders to develop ways to keep growing user numbers and engagement. But I'm yet to see any signs this is the case, and more and more it feels like everyone has bought into this flawed thesis, and that we're witnessing a giant naked emperor scenario.