<story><title>Clubhouse Is a Cargo Cult</title><url>https://ianvanagas.com/2021/08/06/clubhouse-is-a-cargo-cult/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Traster</author><text>The only criticism I would have of this article is that it misses the underlying issue. There was never a reason for high status individuals to be on clubhouse, the reason they were there has nothing to do with the pandemic - it was because of the pump and dump style of Andreesen Horrowitz and the silicon valley obsession with being an early adopter.&lt;p&gt;A16Z seemingly thought simply by telling everyone how excited they were about Clubhouse they could turn Clubhouse into being something to be excited about. The problem being that the reality undermined them though - just as they were telling people to be excited about the innovative conversations on Clubhouse, the number one story was some CEO getting arsey about a journalist reporting the news- a fundamentally petty and narcissistic look for an App that needed to be seen as cool and new. So Elon and co did their &amp;quot;Oh look at us we&amp;#x27;re early adopters dance&amp;quot; but never invested in the platform - because there was &lt;i&gt;never&lt;/i&gt; a reason to, and that failure to give a value proposition to the people they wanted to harvest value from was their core issue.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>potatolicious</author><text>I think you hit on a good point re: status, and in that way Clubhouse is very reminiscent of TED (remember when that was an obsession?) - people gathering to hear pre-eminent experts and learn.&lt;p&gt;Which of course is an admirable thing to do! Listening to well-crafted presentations by learned experts and expanding your knowledge is fantastic!&lt;p&gt;But of course we know how that went - participation in TED quickly became a status marker (not helped by the exorbitant cost of tickets), and the organization capitalized by spinning off TEDx talks all over the world that ended up being filled with more charlatans and hucksters than genuine experts... which seems to have been the direction Clubhouse has also gone.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a bit sad - I think Clubhouse could have been something great - though arguably the &amp;quot;listen to experts talk&amp;quot; thing is better fulfilled by podcasts than a live format. Maybe what the world needs isn&amp;#x27;t a live streaming platform but an authoring tool that makes it &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; easy to get people together to talk, record a podcast, and distribute it. The bar to podcasting has been lowered a lot in recent years, but it&amp;#x27;s still substantial to produce a quality product.&lt;p&gt;I think there&amp;#x27;s also something to be said here for FOMO and what I&amp;#x27;ve taken to calling &amp;quot;the unknowability of ideas&amp;quot; - I think genuinely investors have &lt;i&gt;no idea&lt;/i&gt; why some ideas succeed (see: Facebook), but are terrified of missing out on the next big thing. The combination of this is that many SV VCs seem to regard the quality of ideas as unknowable - you can &lt;i&gt;never&lt;/i&gt; pooh-pooh anything, because the last thing you thought was shite turned out to be a multi-billion dollar company, and therefore ideas are literally unjudgeable. The FOMO seems to induce a lot of hype over some companies&amp;#x2F;products even though the people doing the hyping themselves don&amp;#x27;t seem to understand why.</text></comment>
<story><title>Clubhouse Is a Cargo Cult</title><url>https://ianvanagas.com/2021/08/06/clubhouse-is-a-cargo-cult/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Traster</author><text>The only criticism I would have of this article is that it misses the underlying issue. There was never a reason for high status individuals to be on clubhouse, the reason they were there has nothing to do with the pandemic - it was because of the pump and dump style of Andreesen Horrowitz and the silicon valley obsession with being an early adopter.&lt;p&gt;A16Z seemingly thought simply by telling everyone how excited they were about Clubhouse they could turn Clubhouse into being something to be excited about. The problem being that the reality undermined them though - just as they were telling people to be excited about the innovative conversations on Clubhouse, the number one story was some CEO getting arsey about a journalist reporting the news- a fundamentally petty and narcissistic look for an App that needed to be seen as cool and new. So Elon and co did their &amp;quot;Oh look at us we&amp;#x27;re early adopters dance&amp;quot; but never invested in the platform - because there was &lt;i&gt;never&lt;/i&gt; a reason to, and that failure to give a value proposition to the people they wanted to harvest value from was their core issue.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CPLX</author><text>The problem with Clubhouse is the product sucks.&lt;p&gt;The idea of listening to party-line style conversations isn&amp;#x27;t totally insane. Hypothetically good content &lt;i&gt;could&lt;/i&gt; be created this way, and it seems that happened at least a few times. But the product was and is just awful.&lt;p&gt;The discovery function sucks, it&amp;#x27;s just a crappy stream of mostly low-value hustle culture nonsense that feels like mid-2000&amp;#x27;s junk mail subject lines. There&amp;#x27;s no way (that actually works) to change that to something that guides you to decent content.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s an alternate version of this story where they had a really great technical founding team that reacted to the influx of users and hype by really rapidly iterating on the product and making everyone have a great experience.&lt;p&gt;Instead everyone signed up via exclusive invite and spent a few rounds trying to figure out why they fuck they should care and eventually gave up because they shouldn&amp;#x27;t.</text></comment>