This is the impression I got as well, and I didn't even have to use the app. I got the sense that all anyone cared about was growing their Clubhouse community, rather than using it because they liked it.

It's hard to quantify or put your finger on it, but there was all this "hustle culture" around Clubhouse. Everyone talked about how great it was and how it was going to transform social media. But it was clear in that few believed it and just wanted to be the first to pitch their tent on new plot social media.

As a result Clubhouse had a certain "emptyness" to it. Everyone was talking about how great it was and how great it was going to be, but there wasn't any actual content, just people repeating that message over and over again, or adjacent "hustle culture" topics like Stocks, Crypto, GaryVee Worship, etc. Since people in this space are very vocal online, you got the impression right off the bat that Clubhouse was skyrocketing in popularity, but it ended up being that you just had a small group of people in an echo chamber.

In some ways I think this “meta” conversation style is part of the early stage of nearly every social network. Especially the ones that are public messaging by default (as opposed to something like FB or IG which was in theory at least, friends and family first). Twitter was a lot of talking about Twitter. Mastodon was and sometimes still is the same. Reddit had lots of meta chats.

Even the early stages of fb had discussion of how it compared to hi5 or whatever network we migrated from. Same with google plus.

I think one mark of success of the network is the moment it escapes that conversation. In my opinion it means that the usage of the network is no longer a novelty and is now part of a routine.

Someone should make a platform like this that somehow de-incentivizes influencer culture. I want to see regular people having conversations, not trying to build a following. It's a poison that has snuck into essentially every social media platform.

I think that platform is called "the rest of the human experience outside of the Internet".

Invite some friends over, hang out at a park, go to a bar, throw a party, attend church, join a club, play a sport.

Internet itself isn't the problem. You could organize all of those IRL get-togethers using email. Influencer culture isn't a problem that effects email. Similarly, you can use discord, zoom, skype, IRC, SMS... all of these are broadly free of influencer culture.

Influencer culture is something that emerges on a particular sort of internet communication; mostly on the commercial platforms that specialize in asymmetric communication (where a few people produce and the majority consume.) To keep the consuming majority engaged, these platforms constantly recommend they follow the producing minority. Influencer culture is an inevitable consequence of this dynamic.

Good observation!

I suspect that we ourselves are partially to blame here.

Influencer culture isn't a problem on email, IRC, etc. because when we use those we expect ourselves to be active participants. We take for granted that we have to show up and provide something of interest to the others in the forum.

But when we go on Twitter, YouTube, etc. we expect to just mindlessly consume content without giving anything back. That creates an attentional vacuum where everyone wants to consume and no one wants to produce. Influencers fill that vacuum because no one else does.

In other words, email is like a potluck dinner and we would feel rude walking in without a dish. Other asymmetric social media is like a free picnic where everyone shows up empty handed and ends up eating from the giant tub of fries that McDonald's brought as a marketing campaign because, well, what else is there?

So maybe the trick is to avoid communities that you don't contribute to.

It seems interesting if it's possible to do those things "offline" without them getting taken over by "hustle", but not online.

Like, at a bar, club, or sporting event in "real life", you might occasionally run into a finbro trying to talk to you about crypto, but it's not the dominant experience.

But is there no way to do the equivalent things online (and there's no obvious reason there shouldn't be an online equivalent to a party or club or even sports league) without it being taken over by people who are there only to build their hustle?

The reason it's so prevalent online is because those people are gaming the system to appear prevalent. They talk up themselves and their brand/product to get likes, follows, and "engagement", which the social media algorithms use to rank and display content.

"Real life" doesn't have an algorithm that is so easily gamed, but there are still ways to "game" it. Going to popular locations (e.g. bars), looking presentable/knowledgeable, social engineering, buying advertisements, setting up seminars, etc. But in real life a lot of these are much easier to avoid because there's simply so much more to life that drowns them out. Real life doesn't have a front page that tells you what the most popular person said today -- that is the function of social media (or newspapers).

Of course, social media platforms could be built that don't prioritize content this way, either by using more complicated algorithms that are less easily gameified, or simpler algorithms that cannot be gamified (e.g. simple chronological ranking), or letting the user have more control over the ranking algorithm. But there is currently no simple market incentive for doing so.

That said, I could totally see that shifting even in the coming decade. I think people are getting tired of being advertised to, and transparently being treated as second-class citizen on these platforms. I could see a "premium" alternative to Facebook/Twitter becoming popular, with a small monthly subscription fee in exchange for much more user control and user-centric design.

Of course, more user control means more opportunities for filter bubbles and cultural fragmentation, which as we've seen are pretty bad for democracy. I suppose there is no easy solution to anything.

Sure there is. There are probably millions of Discord servers used by small groups of people for a common purpose. Same thing with Mastodon instances and subreddits. You don't hear about them because they're not trying to take over the world or build some huge platform. They're just groups of people that want to hang out with each other.

It's definitely possible to find the same thing online. Most of the online spaces I hang out in aren't like that: here, the various subreddits I joined, my fairly carefully culled Twitter feed, etc.

Have you ever played online team games? I've played both offline and online games quite a lot and at least here in Sweden I feel it's quite similar.

I certainly agree with that, but also, isn't this the sort of communication that the Internet was built for? What if you live in the middle of nowhere and you want to chat with someone about something none of your neighbors are into? I feel like 20 years ago the Internet was great at this in text form.

One thing I remember was that discoverability was really difficult in Clubhouse. You could pick as many interests as you like, but it seemed like the feed would still spam you with a lot of stuff disconnected from your interests. When you found a good room, there was no way of following it for the next time it was open. Once it closed down, it was gone.

It's a shame, because there were some very interesting rooms with good conversations. It's just that it became a chore to have to sift through all the garbage to find them.

For everyone saying "why not just go out in real life?", that's not really an option if I'm cleaning the house for an hour, while clubhouse is. Also, some of those conversations (biologists discussing trends in the field with other biologists) aren't ones that are easy to just call up a few of your buddies to get.

Join the Fediverse. Most people there have no interest in mainstream culture and none of the software is built in a way to gamify engagement.

I keep thinking of putting together a bridge between twitter and my mastodon server, but I am always postponing it because it feels wrong.

But that's an artifact of the groups of people that self-select onto that platform, not a property of the platform or its incentives itself. If it became as popular as other platforms it would attract people with similar goals as are on other platforms. The technology isn't intentionally designed to reward them, but they will still find rewards and pursue them if it is their best option.

Not necessarily.

Mastodon, Pleroma and Pixelfed intentionally lack features that would be geared for influencers. Mastodon has no "quote tweet" to avoid having people taking conversations out of context. Pixelfed even has admin-controlled options to disable "likes" and display of counts altogether.

The clients, having no "algorithm" beyond basic chronological sort, make it hard for influencers to game the system. And it wouldn't be too difficult to have an instance where users have limited follower counts to keep the conversation more personal.

Chronological order makes it incredibly easy for "influencers" to game the system. Just post a lot. The system that's hardest to game is the one with the most reliance on algorithms, TikTok. On TikTok, you don't go viral because of some mechanical effect where >1/n people retweet you to their n-sized audience or anything like that, you go viral because the algorithm showed your video to random people and enough of them liked it that the algorithm realized your video is the one that some particular subgroup is most likely to enjoy. (Sorry for the run-on sentence.)

On TikTok you don't have to post every day to "grow an audience", you have to post literally one good video, and if it's really good, it'll get 200k likes by the next morning even if it's the first thing you've ever posted. I think that also leads to a reduction in "hustle culture" – if you post something on YouTube most likely no one will ever see it no matter how great it is. But if you post something on TikTok and it's good, people will see it, and so that obviously creates a much stronger motivation to produce rather than to consume.

> if you post something on TikTok and it's good, people will see it, and so that obviously creates a much stronger motivation to produce rather than to consume.

You took one part of my comment and missed all the other, more important parts where we were discussing about a platform people can have "closer" conversations.

My whole argument about the Fediverse is that (most) people are not looking for extrinsic motivation to produce. I've seen very little people worrying about "going viral" and like I said the systems are mostly designed to discourage these things. Having someone "posting a lot" will quickly be seen as a nuisance and people will stop following them, or get outright blocked.

> But that's an artifact of the groups of people that self-select onto that platform, not a property of the platform or its incentives itself.

the Fediverse is _incredibly_ heterogeneous. pick any two distant corners of it and often they'll be completely unaware that the other corner even exists. the platform allows for different cultures like this and the tooling is such that i _think_ this will remain true as it grows (admins can and do "defederate" with communities whose presence makes the experience worse for them, and as sibling points out there's far less algorithmic-driven content).

so i'm receptive to the idea that a long-term fix for influencer culture -- for those who want to avoid it -- really can be found there, simply because it allows for so much self-sorting. influencer culture might very well still exist, but just like every other culture on the platform it'll be concentrated only to specific corners of the Fediverse.

Any idea how does that work in practice? Seems to me like an unresolvable problem, granted I haven't given it much thought.

If users are identifyable, cross-platform self-promotion is inevitable, it's kind of human nature. If users are anon, content is not curatable and quality is unlikely.

I think Twitter Spaces is pretty decent FWIW. Communities already exist around certain topics, there's plenty of subcultures on Twitter. And the platform is already reputation-centric, you can make of it what you will by following appropriate people. So if a reputable person organizes (and curates speakers in) a Space for a given topic, it can make for decent conversations to tune it. Seems kind of as good as anon voice-chatrooms can get.

It's not audio, but the Fediverse gives me that as an alternative to influencer centric networks (in particular twitter).

As an alternative to instagram, there is Pixelfed, which integrates with all the other servers such as Mastodon or Pleroma.

Online mediums that do one-on-one conversations (instant messaging, etc) or small group chats of people who know each other don't have this issue, but they're also pretty limiting for meeting new people. It seems like there's a trade-off between a platform making it easy to discover new people versus a platform fostering conversations between invested people participating equally. The largest social platforms have been the ones that are better on the discover-new-people side while doing worse on the other side.

I feel like discord is pretty good at this.

How about a service I can pay for that blocks/mutes for me anyone that’s ever had a Clubhouse account, on all platforms?

I'd pay for that.

I am building a platform like this. Also, you could try out Lunchclub.

it's called a dinner party. you essentially can't have this "at scale" without creating the incentives leading to the contentification of it.

It blew up mid-pandemic when tech/VC people were mostly trapped at home with little social to do, but drink delivered cocktails on Zoom.

It also coincided a huge increase in bit/altcoin prices, which made pump/dump schemes profitable (especially early NFT). Politics also bloomed in Sept-Dec 2020 when BLM wanted somewhere to motivate as did those across the spectrum of "suppressed voices" after Jan 6.

Yeah, pretty boring.

https://www.boldspace.com/news/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of...

Agreed. Best case experiences were in rooms that felt like mid-tier tech conference panels.

Clubhouse could've leaned into the above idea and really figured it out. Like, how do you mix the experience of a live in-person panel of experts and also leverage asynchrony across space and time... Maybe there would've been something there. But as it stood, it felt like it hit the jackpot with a clever idea and a bunch of hype but never actually solved any of the hard problems that might turn it into something real.

My favorite thing about Clubhouse were the profile descriptions people chose to write about themselves. Somehow they were even worse than Twitter profile descriptions, and were both deeply unironic and hilariously serious.

Ever meet someone with a doctorate degree who insists on being addressed as "Doctor" So-and-so at all times? I've only met a handful of people like that, thankfully, but it was like Clubhouse was a shining light in the night to these self-obsessed moths.

This sounds like an audio version of LinkedIn.

LinkedIn kind of creeps me out because it is the only social network I actively participate in as my authentic self. (Because I make games, I have to go on all kinds of things in test accounts) When people I know make an announcement and I see it I feel like I don't want to be supportive. And it is useful to know where people are working that you haven't seen for a while. But to post an article? I don't know.

This, so much this!!!

I tried to have fun with Twitter's Periscope a year ago, which has been out for a while. It's a group video chat app where anyone can pop in. In that way it's sort of like clubhouse, but with video. When I would get on, it was 80% people sitting around talking to their friends, often in thick accents about nothing of particular interest (e.g people I don't know, things the chat participants experienced together that I have insufficient context to understand). That's probably 95% of the internet voice and video chats and I'm just not aware of it because I'm not randomly dropping in on people's conversations like you're allowed to do on periscope. Anyway, it's not the most easily monetizable thing, I'd imagine.

On Telegram voice chat, there's always some jerk or lunatic who talks over everyone who the rest of the chat participants have to tell to shut up. I think this is just a telegram problem because clubhouse has better moderation features.

Anyway, if you have a group of people you know and want to talk why not use Zoom? It's a better experience in every way. What's the benefit of letting random people drop in? Maybe with very clever moderation features it could work, but as is it seems kind of pointless.

> Anyway, if you have a group of people you know and want to talk why not use Zoom?

Because they're a terrible company who has repeatedly demonstrated that they're at best shockingly incompetent at protecting your data or at worst maliciously allowing it to be leaked and collected by 3rd parties.

Still, there are a lot of non-zoom options for video chat that would be a better experience so your overall point still stands, but it's still just weird to see anyone ask "why not use Zoom?" when by this time you'd expect to hear "Why would anyone still use Zoom?"

The few rooms I found on Clubhouse that were interesting had a theme of reading bedtime/sleep stories.

Which is essentially a live podcast to put you to sleep

I would expect to get trolled in rooms like that; it just sounds too contrived to not be a troll. Calm gentle voice interrupted by loud screams just as you were about to fall asleep, things like that.

So... LinkedIn in audio format?

Sounds like a waking nightmare.

> Virtually every room I joined was filled with self-described "thought leaders" and influencers promoting themselves

Talk is cheap. That's why this model doesn't work.

Text is cheaper, yet Twitter.

Text is cheap to scale on Twitter, which is why it succeeded. Your message can be read and understood in a matter of seconds. That's much faster than listening to and processing an audio clip.

Text tweets have infinite reach with enough retweets. It can be embedded on websites, drawing a new audience that doesn't spend time on Twitter. It doesn't disappear if you weren't there right when the tweet was being posted.

Audio has none of these things. Nobody wants to watch a recorded stream, the whole appeal is that you are LIVE with everyone at the same time.

This tangentially reminds me of a shameless puff piece on one of the financial networks about a startup lead by a "self-made man" who invested part of his trust fund into his business and whose father, worth over $250M at the time, was a major investor.

> Story time: either a huge challenge they overcame to become the great success they are today, or trying to make the most basic common sense sound like some insightful breakthrough.

Just sounds like LinkedIn. But I always see this kind of garbage on places that aren't pseudonymous, if there's any degree of anonymity they (rightly) get shit flung at them.

That's what's nice about HN imo. Fewer bullshitters stinking up the room

Same experience here. I've had the lingering suspicion that live audio is too real and that it makes the lack of authenticity and narcissism of social media influencing too obvious. Maybe someone should try 15 second sound bites that are scripted, rehearsed, edited, and mixed with music.

Same. I left thinking that the concept was cool, but the problem they had was discoverability. Bad actors were taking advantage of the system and pushing down good content. It was cool for the first 3 weeks when the content was amazing, and I felt like I was able to passively listen to fantastic content while working. Afterwards, it just became too much of a hassle to swift through everything in order to find the content I found interesting, so I left.

Sounds like a low-rent TED Talk.

Clubhouse etc has made me even more suspicious of anyone who uses the term "thought leader" in any serious capacity

It’s a good filter for me to single out narcissists.

Everyone wants to be a cult leader

I sincerely tried using clubhouse, but all I could find were rooms that I can only describe as South indian sex rings? I was not expecting that

sounds like every crypto Twitter Space I've lurked in.