Join my proletariat revolution against the Clubhouse circle jerk...
Join my proletariat revolution against the Clubhouse circle jerk...
Clubhouse is a worse-quality form of podcasting that gives more mindless people the chance to ramble and incurs huge opportunity costs for our public discourse & information acquisition...
There has been so… much… buzz… about Clubhouse, especially starting since around a month ago, when more major media outlets started reporting on it, and that was when I got looped into this Ponzi scheme circle jerk… (please do forgive my crude language and treat this as a light-hearted trolling post rather than my usual serious spiel…)
I’ve spent some time on the platform and even got into some debates in random rooms. I’ll explain in a few posts why I think it’s an interesting media phenomenon that will likely not last very long, is mostly harmful to our discourse, and possibly even engender regulatory and legal issues around free speech and securities frauds…
This is the most confusing exclusive app you’ll have encountered
Everyone’s response after getting on the app for the first 3 days has been “wait what’s going on here…” In short, Clubhouse is an audio-only social media app. People start rooms to have conversations with each other, and anyone can listen in: Elon Musk asked Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev questions about the GameStop trades; Bill Gates got interviewed by Andrew Sorkin; Joe Rogan, Tim Dillon, Lex Fridman, Bret Weinstein, and Naval Ravikant discussing random topics…
You can also start rooms yourself and invite followers into your rooms to have discussions. The idea is that this app would be an open space where people can learn from any kind of discussion out there, while also discussing their thoughts live with their friends and broadcasting them out to their followers.
The reality, however, is that the distribution is incredibly skewed, more so than almost any other platform. Someone like Elon Musk or Eric Weinstein can easily fill up a 5,000-people chat room whenever they speak, but there are only a few hundred personalities with tens of thousands of followers and that kind of influence. The rest 99.9% of the Clubhouse users likely have 10-200 followers (most on the lower end), which means when you open a public chat room and host a discussion, nobody will come listen, nobody. Seriously, you’d be happy to see 2 of your friends showed up to support for 3 minutes before leaving…
For the first 3 days on the platform, you’d be confused; and after 3 days, you’d realize that it does almost nothing to fulfill its promises of being a great education and discussion platform.
Clubhouse is a shittier form of podcasting
People keep comparing Clubhouse with podcasting. I see the parallel but think the differences are quite fundamental.
There’s some level of preparation needed for podcasting; it’s slightly more formal; the information density is much higher. Setting up a podcast has a very low entry barrier in terms of budget and technology, but also in some way a pretty high barrier: you either need to have things to say yourself, or have good connections to be your guests. You also need to keep up a somewhat consistent update pace. In short, it takes some effort to produce a semi-legit podcast.
Clubhouse essentially removed most of these barriers away and now gives more people the chance to do podcasting without needing to be thoughtful. The app is so efficiently designed that you’re essentially 1 click away from entering any discussion room and 2 clicks away from being able to speak to the world through your iPhone.
If you’re some middle-level VC investor or a marketing director at some random startup, you now have a platform to ramble on for hours while getting praised by others with an equal amount of free time to waste. If you don’t want to devote the time to actually do research and prepare for a podcast, and neither do you want to leave a record to be held accountable for your remarks, you go on Clubhouse.
You can see this as a flourishment of human potential since more people are now empowered to voice their ideas and communicate with each other; or you can be cynical and say: well… maybe it was not bad that these people previously weren’t talking that much… because they’re just not that impressive; their ideas aren’t original; they’re more incentivized to sound cool around their peers rather than voicing anything contrarian (and certainly not on Clubhouse seeking truths); they’re just making each other feel good… Ultimately all this is just adding more noise to the discourse.
I do want to make clear that there is nothing wrong with all this. People should have the freedom and liberty to voice their opinions regardless of their credentials or quality of arguments. However, I take issue with the medium itself and the kind of intellectual thought bubbles that Clubhouse has created – it fundamentally disincentivizes genuine discussions and brings out the attention-seeking and exclusivity-loving components of our human nature.
All this is why I’m a big fan of podcasting and not a big fan of Clubhouse.
Clubhouse incurs huge opportunity costs for knowledge acquisition
Yes, once in a while you’d stumble upon some good conversations, but these are rare, and you’d have to listen in the room for a long while before possibly getting something substantive.
Also, if you want to listen to Bill Gates’s newest insights, you can just read his newest climate book or his hundreds of published “Gates Notes” – all of them were produced under more deliberation. Why go on Clubhouse? The only scenario I can imagine where content on Clubhouse is valuable is when you’ve literally exhausted reading/listening to all of Gates’s remarks (or anyone else for that matter), and you have no choice but to be on Clubhouse waiting for their newest content to come out. But that is nearly impossible.
The enormous amount of thoughtful content that you can access nowadays via YouTube, podcasts, and good ol’ fashioned reading means that Clubhouse is simply not the best place to gain information/knowledge, and by spending time on Clubhouse, you’re incurring a huge opportunity cost – time that you could’ve otherwise devoted to consuming much higher-quality media.
Why I think Clubhouse is a Ponzi scheme circle jerk
I call it a Ponzi scheme partly because it’s invite-only: you can only be invited in by someone who’s already on the platform; once you’re on, you get 2 invites to use on the others, and whether you get more invites depends on your clout – i.e. how often you're speaking on the app, how many people follow you, whether you're starting rooms/clubs, whether the people you invite are participating a lot themselves…
This sense of exclusivity drives people to fien for invites – like buying one on eBay for hundreds of dollars or networking a bit more with the entrepreneurs around you. People calculate whom they should invite in order maximize their clout on the site… The blackbox algorithm combined with a culture of exclusivity means the app gets to monetize on our human nature to the fullest extent…
I call it a circle jerk – please do forgive my crude language – but that’s literally what people on Clubhouse are doing, and there really isn’t a more accurate term to describe it. You put a few entrepreneurs/influencers/investors (or whatever other wishy-washy job in Silicon Valley/LA/NY that you can think of) together in a virtual room, what do you think will happen?
You think they will call each other out that their “innovations” are in fact bullshit and add little value to society, that most of them didn’t work very hard in college or gained any concrete skills, that they haven’t actually thought very deeply about how to address the urgent issues in society but are just regurgitating buzzwords like “social entrepreneurship” to pretend to be thoughtful?…
No, they won’t do any of this. Instead, they will conform to their little thought bubbles, and any slight deviation from the dominant narrative would likely lead to social ostracization and even damage to career repuation. When 9 out of 10 speakers are saying one same thing, the 1 person left would likely not pose any objection, because doing so will make him/her look like a fool to the hundreds of people listening in… Why take the risk? This is not the hill to die on. (Well, perhaps I died on such a hill in a Bitcoin debate on Clubhouse lol, which I will tell you about in another email).
These little discussion rooms on Clubhouse are literally the textbook definition of “echo chambers”…
Do you think Silicon Valley is aware of what they’re doing?
Again, for the record, I want to say that I don’t think what’s happening on Clubhouse is a problem per se. You can pat each other on the back all you want, but I just want to make sure we’re on the same page about what’s literally happening here… Do you think the Silicon Valley “elites” are aware of what they’re doing? I’m not sure.
Stand-up comedian Tim Dillon did quite a funny rant about this: “Why are we letting tech people talk to each other?! You already run the world; we’re all your slaves; just have the decency to do it quietly! Wall Street never has a thing like this! I was a subprime mortgage sales guy; we never told people how we were f*cking them on app every day!”
This is why I had the title for this email: “Join my proletariat revolution...” I joked to my friends that I want to get as many losers like myself on the app as possible, just so that we can ruin the Silicon Valley elites’ “exclusive” party… So, if you’re curious what Clubhouse is like but need an invite to get on the app, just let me know and I’ll get you on… Let’s have some fun on the platform together ;)
As always, please let me know your thoughts. You may leave a public comment, or privately respond to this email which will carry your words directly to my personal inbox.
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