
An audio app that has consumed my life - dshipper
https://divinations.substack.com/p/inside-the-clubhouse
======
s1mon
I didn’t have the patience to read all the way through this article. Something
about the writing really drove me crazy. I just want a basic explanation of
what this is. This TechCrunch article gets to the point much more quickly.
[https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/18/clubhouse-app-chat-
rooms/](https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/18/clubhouse-app-chat-rooms/)

~~~
optimaton
Really curious to know. Is it because of the conversational tone or the click-
baity suspense?

~~~
s1mon
The article is almost half done before it begins to explain the basic
mechanics of the service, and I still didn't really get it until I read
elsewhere. If it was easy for anyone to sign up and/or it had been around for
a while, that might be OK, but given that it's not, a sentence or two to tell
the reader WTF you're writing about would be helpful.

TechCrunch explains it succinctly in the second paragraph: "The most buzzy of
these startups is Clubhouse, an audio-based social network where people can
spontaneously jump into voice chat rooms together. You see the unlabeled rooms
of all the people you follow, and you can join to talk or just listen along,
milling around to find what interests you."

~~~
nbashaw
Hey! I wrote this article. There is literally a description of the basic
mechanics of the app starting at word 48 of the piece. I have no clue how you
missed this!

> "After we exchanged pleasantries, Paul explained how the app works. There’s
> one global “room,” and when you join you start off on mute, but anyone can
> unmute themselves. When you open the app, it sends push notifications to
> everyone on the app, so they can join you and chat if they’re free."

I'm curious why this didn't work for you and what you would have wanted
instead?

------
chrisjarvis
This sounds kinda fun! One of the most unique apps I ever used had a similar
concept. It was called "Wakie: The Social Alarm Clock" and the concept was
simple you would set a time you wanted to be woken up and at that time you
would receive a phone call from a random other user of the app (likely from
another country due to time zones!) and you could also volunteer to wake
people. The call would be ended after 60 seconds. These were probably my first
experiences talking to someone from another country. The app still exists but
has pivoted to something else.

~~~
hobo_mark
Wow, that sounds so diabolically creepy I have no idea who would ever sign up
to be called _on the phone_ , _by strangers_ , _while sleeping_.

~~~
bityard
Those with a sense of adventure, I presume

------
TechBro8615
Clickbait title. The app is called “Clubhouse” and it’s a way of meeting new
people. It’s invite only.

Interesting post, though.

~~~
snypher
"Second, and more importantly, on Clubhouse you can meet great people."

I didn't make it much further than this. The article didn't make it clear as
to why its users were more "great".

~~~
detaro
easy enough for an invite-only app to fill itself with people that mostly
think the other insiders are "great" too

~~~
gav
That is true, but it's also been my experience that better discussion happens
in smaller forums. Whether that's usenet, reddit, or HN, when it's new, you
feel like you're speaking to a small group of people vs. shouting in a large
room.

The quality of discussion on HN have dropped over time and a large part of
that feels like that with more people trying to get their opinions heard,
there's a lot of interesting opinions that are missed. Just look at the
difference in upvotes between early posts and later mid-thread discussions, if
you use that as a proxy for readership, there's a lot less people engaged
because conversations get harder to follow and it's not easy to identify
conversations that are new to you.

------
acjohnson55
I briefly worked on HuffPost Live, which was basically like this, but with a
single stream of content. There were hosts and programming, but at any time,
guests could audition to join a conversation. The dynamism of having guests of
all levels of expertise on a topic was really compelling. I still feel like
the project was ahead of its time. It also didn't have the elitism aspect for
gaining access.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HuffPost_Live](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HuffPost_Live)

------
Jgrubb
"...that has consumed my life" \- is that supposed to make me _want_ to use
it?

~~~
code_duck
I thought this was going to be a post written from the perspective of the
developer of a music app, like audio processing or something. I’m a lot more
interested in having an app I develop consume my life!

~~~
Jgrubb
I was secretly hoping for it to be GarageBand, which I only discovered a few
weeks ago after apparently having it on my phone for several years now. It's a
fantastic little app that does things I couldn't have dreamt of ten years ago.
I've been writing pieces of songs, which is something (at 41) I've never done
before.

But no, this is basically chat roulette 2020.

~~~
code_duck
Garageband for iOS is absolutely amazing. It is simply the best app there ever
was, besides browsers and the basics.

As a guitar player since a kid I LOVE touch guitar, bass, the the drums,
everything and especially the fact that it's not just an instrument but a song
studio. I couldn't say enough good things about GarageBand for iOS. It's
amazing. I have hundreds of diverse song snippets since 2010.

ChatRoulette! Ha. You're so right.

------
Causality1
>a community for casual drop-in audio conversations

That there are people to whom this is appealing is interesting. For me
personally this sounds like the tenth circle of hell.

~~~
empath75
It seems more like a platform for call-in talk radio style podcasts.

~~~
joezydeco
We've nearly completely detached ourselves from live-anything these days, with
the exception of sports. It will be interesting to see if people want to
migrate back to a real-time broadcast. If the host/content was compelling
enough, it could work.

But 99.99% of podcasts are not that.

~~~
Causality1
Seriously? You know Twitch is a massive thing, right? Game streaming is
already a billion-dollar industry, not to mention all the non-gaming live
content like mukbangs.

------
ajot
> If this was a podcast, I would think “hey that’s interesting, maybe I’ll
> listen later.” I would probably read the episode title and show notes, and I
> would consider whether the topics were interesting to me, and maybe I’d
> listen, or maybe I would save it for later.

> But with Clubhouse, the conversation is live, and there are no recordings.
> And when I join they might notice me. So when I got that push notification,
> I knew: it’s now or never. I had no clue what they were talking about. I was
> either in or out.

So, apart from the novelty and true potential use-cases, this works out of
FOMO? I do have enough FOMO right now with RSS, Youtube, Reddit and Hacker
News, I don't really find this appealing.

------
m3kw9
Clubhouse marketing campaign

~~~
BubRoss
Inside the clickbait marketing campaign that has consumed my job.

------
olivierduval
"All of a sudden, I’m explaining my dinky blog post to a guy with almost a
million twitter followers!"

OK, so it's the usual app: please let me be famous for 5 minutes because one
of my God is talking to me. Facebook did it long before...

~~~
olivierduval
"I think it’ll feel similar to Twitter, in a lot of ways. Sometimes a famous
person retweets you or replies to you. More often, a “famous in your world”
person does."

Enough... I'm definetly ouf of this

------
thanatropism
How much of this is related to shelter-in-place?

------
dirtydroog
That was a very long advert.

~~~
dangoor
It was very long, but it wasn't all an advertisement. He spent a good deal of
time talking about the potential prospects of the app, issues it may encounter
(even with some suggestions), and similar apps that have come up in the past
that didn't quite make the cut. That's a lot more in-depth than most product
reviews go.

~~~
_curious_
Long form "in-depth" advertisement is a thing.

------
rl3
[https://clubhouse.io/](https://clubhouse.io/)

If I were them I'd be slightly pissed off.

~~~
firloop
Why? The products aren't similar.

~~~
rl3
Emphasis on slightly, however they're both startups with software products
with the same name, even if those products do different things.

Whenever I come up with a new product and choose a name, I try to conduct due
diligence first to see if there's any other software companies with the same
name. It seems like they didn't do that, or if they did they didn't care.

On the other hand, maybe the newer Clubhouse drives more traffic to the
established one, who knows.

------
doh
I'm on clubhouse for a while.

I see some people calling this article a marketing campaign. I must admit that
I spend a lot of time on Clubhouse. Since I joined my usage of Twitter and
other networks dropped significantly [0].

It's hard to explain what makes Clubhouse so unique and addictive, but it
reminds me the early days of Twitter when conversations were more honest and
more serendipitous [1].

I'm curious to see how the team will handle the growth. Being closed with a
small tight group of people that are loosely connected in the real world makes
it quite special.

[0]
[https://twitter.com/synopsi/status/1253916397811273728?s=20](https://twitter.com/synopsi/status/1253916397811273728?s=20)

[1]
[https://twitter.com/synopsi/status/1252431014183354369?s=20](https://twitter.com/synopsi/status/1252431014183354369?s=20)

------
SoulMan
What about discord voice chat ?

~~~
StavrosK
What about two tin cans connected by a string?

~~~
Y_Y
If you don't have a second can you can just create a loopback interface to
transmit locally.

------
ChrisArchitect
if it's a badly written article that many aren't finding informative, stop
upvoting it! Here's the other techcrunch article ppl mentioned, posted a week
ago and not garnering much interest. heh

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22913692](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22913692)

------
tclancy
Cool. I had an idea like this a while back (as a dev I know exactly what ideas
are worth) where I would finally learn Elixir and LiveView by building
something similar but more like a CB network where you could only connect with
people within a certain distance of you. The level of effort and the
possibility for trolling left it on the shelf though.

------
michael_fine
I hate to ask, but does anyone have a clubhouse invite?

~~~
exolymph
I can hook you up if you email me.

~~~
exolymph
Sorry, gotta withdraw this offer — got too many emails about it.

------
jbverschoor
Now I’m curious for an invite

------
lukevp
The app seems compelling but not something I’d likely use much. I’ve noticed
this lowkey buzz for Roam building. While I respect their approach and agree
with some core concepts, I feel like the implementation is not ideal for the
types of notes I, and many others, take. If anyone’s interested in a new note
app we are building, PM me for access to the alpha. We are launching the beta
in May but would appreciate feedback in the meantime!

