> 100% of the payment will go to the creator ... Clubhouse will take nothing.
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)
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Giants will clone and make a piece of shit. Apps like this survive by creating a network of people. They do that by creating demand to join the service. How do you do that? Make it invite only, and invite a ton of high profile people and get them using and talking about it, creating FOMO.
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.
What did Snapchat pivot to? The only pivot I know they did was changing from disappearing messages to stories (not sure if the disappearing messages are still there?). But this wasn't exactly a pivot as far as I know because of FB copying the stories feature afterwards.
my intuition on FB agrees with you but I can’t think of something like clubhouse that they didn’t buy or attempt to? any particular ships you’re referring to?
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.
What would they patent exactly? Group voice chat? I imagine someone patented that decades ago and if anything, Clubhouse will be licensing or fighting patent trolls soon if they aren't already.
People forget that Instagram was iOS-only for quite a while before an Android version was available.
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.
Instagram was a much more niche app back when it was iOS-only, and it didn't have the likes of FB, Twitter and Microsoft racing to copy all of its features.
Yeah I don’t understand their business model, there is a cost to process a payment so even if I give someone $100 the credit card company and payment processors will take a cut.
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.
It's still a risky business model, since in certain fraud cases it will be left holding the bag for chargebacks if it has released the money to a fraudster but they don't have a revenue stream proportional to the payment amount to cover whatever percentage of the transactions are fraudulent.
Not sure why you're down voted. People that steal credit cards find ways to fund money from those cards to themselves. Fake apps are one way this can happen. When a company sets up a model where anyone could easily become a receiver of money and anyone could easily pay, they get into the AML world.
> When a company sets up a model where anyone could easily become a receiver of money and anyone could easily pay, they get into the AML world.
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.
He's suggesting two people can pay each other and get a ton of credit card points off it. This happens anytime you can refill something with 100% of the value you charged to a CC. I've noticed this with Ko-fi too.
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)