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Businesses

Inside the Rise and Fall of Clubhouse, a Pandemic Poster Child of VC-backed Hype (businessinsider.com) 35

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
From a report: In May 2020, when the pandemic raged, the comedian and TV writer Marlena Rodriguez got an invite to a new app called Clubhouse that offered the homebound online masses a way to spend some of their suddenly abundant time. In the ensuing months, Rodriguez jousted in a chat room with the celebrity Ashton Kutcher, gained more than 13,000 followers, and started a party room on Fridays that frequently swelled to over 1,000 people. She wrote a play, "Once Upon a Clubhouse," and hired actors to perform it on the app. "I was in love," she said. Today, "I question why I'm even still on Clubhouse," Rodriguez said. Her Friday-night room has dwindled to about 30 people.

More than any other startup, Clubhouse epitomizes the venture-capital-backed euphoria that swept the tech industry since lockdowns shut millions of people inside and pushed them online for connection, entertainment, and information. Marc Andreessen has called the app "the Athenian agora come to life," referring to the hub of democracy in ancient Greece. It has raised more than $100m from his firm and other top VCs, garnering a $4bn valuation. But with vaccinations rising and more people returning to normal life, Clubhouse has been hit particularly hard. Daily downloads of the app have plunged more than 90% since a peak in June, while daily average users are down almost 80% since February, Apptopia data indicated. Insider interviews with creators, advertisers, VCs, and others in the tech industry show a platform struggling to build an audience and keep it. Moneymaking opportunities are also slim, which makes the app a tough sell for creators and users as there are many other options online and off.
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Inside the Rise and Fall of Clubhouse, a Pandemic Poster Child of VC-backed Hype More

Inside the Rise and Fall of Clubhouse, a Pandemic Poster Child of VC-backed Hype

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  • Counterfeit capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)

    by shm ( 235766 ) on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @08:05PM (#62018655)

    Matt Stoller called this funding mechanism Counterfeit Capitalism in the context of WeWork, I think it applies here as well.

    Apart from the mechanics of the funding, didnâ(TM)t they think even for one minute that their product would be just a feature for the big guys?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      This seems to be the new standard. Start some sort of bullshit business, take huge amounts of money from investors, pay yourself millions and then fail.

      Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

    • Indeed, and now Twitter has something similar - with a similar looking outcomes (so far). For Twitter though, it's just a little side line which they can drop at will - it's not their entire multi-billion dollar business.

      Clubhouse was good at the start because it was very niche and small - if you started a channel, you wanted to show off your chops, so you got good people to talk to and you talked about important stuff. Your channel would attract similarly committed people, and all was good. There was an ai

      • My first take on Clubhouse was that it was like one of those corporate conference calls from hell where the CxOs speak, and we minions had to listen. Except here you volunteered to join the call. Someone invited me, I created an account out of curiosity and never once found an interesting conversation to listen to.

        Deleted.

  • Wow. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Such a massive phenomenon that I'd never heard of it once, ditto this Rodriguez person.

  • Forget something? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by systemd-anonymousd ( 6652324 ) on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @08:13PM (#62018679)

    How is it possible for someone to write so much and yet forget to share most basic details? Like, for example, what the fuck this app even is, what it claims to solve, and what the user experience is like.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      How is it possible for someone to write so much and yet forget to share most basic details? Like, for example, what the fuck this app even is, what it claims to solve, and what the user experience is like.

      You must be new here. Shitty, incompetent reporting is the standard. And they do it really well here.

    • Re:Forget something? (Score:4, Informative)

      by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @08:57PM (#62018771) Homepage Journal

      What do you think this is, a printed magazine?

      https://duckduckgo.com/?q=club... [duckduckgo.com]

    • These editors, they don't do summarising. Or editing. What's quite amazing is how they produce so few articles a day by simply yanking the first two paragraphs into a quote and hitting [publish]. Between the three of them they should be able to do a couple hundred. Maybe they have a huggy-feely in-group session of an hour or two about each headline?

      Speaking of which, if you see a headline like this, you know it's about a story that's supposed to cost you at least half an hour to slog through, immediately

      • Their pastes are [somehow] better writing than your manifesto. And half of it is ad copy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      It is just another social media app. It was invite only to create a sense of exclusivity. It was not directed at the teen white influencer like Gabby Pettito so many would not be familiar with the platform. Like any such platform, it depends on free content from people who hope to gain from other deals. Unlike other platforms, it wanted to attract established names to bolster the site. As stated in the summary the challenge was for these known names to create compelling content to keep and attract new use

  • It doesn't matter if gen-z has no idea what it is. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @08:17PM (#62018685)

    Never heard of it. And from talking to my 16 yo stepson he's never heard of it or the "celebrities" the summary mentions. Neither has any of my adopted siblings between the ages of 12 and 16. It's irrelevant.

  • Clubhouse is probably a great idea in a world where Facebook (and the like) doesn't already exist.

    • In a world without Zuckbook, these chuckleheads could take down MySpace! And ICQ.

    • Where is that world, I wanna go there.

      Yes, I'll even put up with Clubhouse.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sd4f ( 1891894 )
      The criticism I heard was that fairly quickly became a platform for get-rich-quick schemes and people aggressively pushing their products/services. Once I heard that, all the exclusive shiny newness vanished, and I went on with my life.

      • VCs gotta make their money (back) somehow ... Being or promoting hucksters doesn't seem like too far a stretch.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sd4f ( 1891894 )
          I don't think the platform itself promoted it, I just think the hucksters found a new, available platform which allowed them a new way to peddle their junk. After all, the format clubhouse operates, really lends itself well to that style of infomercial marketing. One thing that has been demonstrated the last few iterations of social media is the early adopters are the ones who have been most rewarded, particularly on platforms such as youtube, instagram and snapchat. So I'm not surprised that some of these

  • Clubhouse was OK, then it sucked (Score:5, Informative)

    by TheSync ( 5291 ) on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @08:32PM (#62018725) Journal

    At first, Clubhouse was an interesting place to hear knowledgable people talk about interesting topics.

    Then as more people came on, it became a useless place where highly uninformed people were running channels full of incorrect or useless information. Even the channel titles decayed in quality over time from "How to scale your system backend" to "Look at my hot, plump [back end]".

    Clubhouse's big flaw was lack of a reputation/review/quality system of some kind, especially for people running channels.

    Twitter spaces get around that because you are already following competent and informative people for Tweets, so when they spawn a space, you know the quality of the moderator.

    Clubhouse also was horrible in terms of accessibility for the blind.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Sounds a lot like this place.

    • Twitter spaces get around that

      Shit, that was a pretty good troll, I got this deep before I noticed anything was amiss.

    • Replace "Clubhouse" with "internet" and you pretty much have a true statement there as well. That's basically exactly what happened with the internet in general. It used to be good and full of interesting topics and an exciting place to exchange ideas ... then the idiots were left in.

      Next time we build something like that, we must keep accessing it complicated enough that you need a three digit IQ to actually get on.

  • Zoom could just have video-disabled meetings, and suddenly it's the same as Clubhouse.

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