Facebook Launches Podcast and Live Audio Room Services
theouterhaven.netThis whole format is a dead end. Clubhouse user growth and engagement is stalled out (and likely in decline). Not that Facebook minds. The millions spent cloning Clubhouse are a rounding error on their financial statements.
Strong agree. I'm still a little bewildered about how Clubhouse got so much hype in the first place considering the actual product obviously sucks.
With that said, I think Clubhouse could be in a way better position if they'd used their head start to actually work on making the product not awful.
I have listened to 1-2 conversations where I've thought hey this has some value, but every time I open up and scroll through it it looks like early 2000's email spam except with emojis. Super low value topics like hustle harder or marketing nonsense.
With social apps the algorithm is everything. I mean just look at Tik Tok. I feel like Clubhouse could have tried harder to make a magical experience where you opened it up and an interesting conversation was tossed your way. Oh well.
With respect to content, I think the core problem for Clubhouse is its live-centric model. This limits both the total volume of content available to be recommended, but also the data upon which an recommender can be trained.
This, of course, is a paradoxical problem for Clubhouse as live audio was its central innovation and distinguishing feature.
Probably doesn't help that Clubhouse was iOS-only for a long time. People in the local dev community would now and then suggest a Clubhouse night, but we have to shot it down everytime as it would eliminate a sufficient portion of members. End up using Discord, but definitely would have jumped on the ship, had they not cashing in on exclusivity for so long.
I am still not sure if I can sign up without going on a waiting list and having to share all my personal contacts.
Mind you, at this point I am not even going to try because there are likely too many established players.
Yeah, it was weird to completely lock out anyone without an iphone.
Clubhouse is still invite-only, so that’s an artificial cap on growth.
They still have the one-shot option of opening up to anyone and getting a huge bump of use and users, maybe right before another round or IPO.
Clubhouse 2021 installs[1]:
Feb - 9.6 million
Mar - 2.7 million
Apr - 922 thousand
Invites do not appear to be the growth bottleneck. With the Android app having been released in mid-May, installs will shoot back up for a time, but it sure looks like the actual TAM for Clubhouse is quite a bit smaller than its investors thought (given its crazy valuation).
Clubhouse is the app version of "this meeting could have been an email", but replace "meeting" with "live audio" and "email" with "podcast". This app/format is and always was the perfect trap for the VC/product manager class.
Indeed it is a dead end. It is a mere 'feature request' to many of the existing popular apps out there rather than a separate full blown app.
The pandemic was Clubhouse's selling point and it has been copied to death by its competitors. Now that it is nearly over, there really isn't any point in going back or waiting for an invite when everyone else has the same feature on the old platforms.
I guess Phase 3 is when we start to see ByteDance creating their own Clubhouse clone and other smaller companies will be selling an SDK for others to rapidly create their own Clubhouse rooms.
At the end of this experiment, it will result in Clubhouse shutting down and giving back the money they raised from the VCs. Isn't that right Secret Inc.?
Clubhouse has been amazing though. I hope it can sustain. Discussions on it are much, much better than Twitter nonsense.
Interesting that you like it, personally I couldn't seem to find the "good" content. There are always a huge number of chats going on and it feels impossible to figure out which ones are the interesting ones. Also, after following a few people the number of notifications was so high I had to turn them off. But without notifications how can you know what is going on?
I would assume the discussions are better because they are smaller. Has any online community managed to maintain quality discussions at scale?
Are you speaking about any medium of discussion? If so, Hacker News is a great example.
Is breathtaking the amount of effort Facebook has spent xeroxing other products.
I’m still amused by how they had their own online game show because of the success of HQ Trivia.
Facebook... and Spotify, and Twitter. They've all got Clubhouse clones going now. Sometimes I find the state of 'innovation' in large tech companies a little depressing...
It's probably true that they cannot resist cloning existing feature that's already working.
But to cheer you up, FB is putting lots of efforts (rumor goes 10000 folks) working on AR/VR. That's quite a lot innovation :)
And 200 are working on "how to show ads in 3d"
Working on putting ads in VR by the sounds of it
Yeah, that's the part I don't quite appreciate what FB is doing on VR. They heavily subsidize the hardware, pushed lots of competitors out (e.g. Vive is really struggling), then start selling ads once they got dominant position.
It's hard to grow as a social media startup now. If you're successful, Zuckerberg and the rest will spend tens of millions cloning you.
Only a select few reach escape velocity. Snapchat, TikTok.
How do you survive without being trampled by the giants?
You focus on things people aren’t willing to post on their Facebook feed. Snap and TikTok remain strong despite being copied because it allows people to essentially shitpost without their close friends and family seeing it.
I wonder how VSCO is faring compared to Instagram, which is another similarly "anti-social" network. TikTok has the benefit of being owned by a larger conglomerate, ByteDance. Supposedly Pinterest was in talks to acquire VSCO.
You can't. They can spend 200 engineers to study everything about your product and clone it. And it won't even make a dent in their revenue.
The big players can only copy or buy up.
> only
That’s a bold statement.
On the surface it is. But I think if you pause and look closely at the state a lot of the big tech firms these days, they're not run by visionaries and innovators any longer. They're run by C-levels trying to appease stockholders, and middle managers trying to appease the C-levels. That's why startups continue to thrive and occasionally outflank the incumbents.
There are very few visionary people left in tech these days. Most have died, retired, or gone on to other things.
I'd like to see a list of people that HN people think are currently "visionary." I have a few in mind, but I'd like to see what other people think, because I'm sure I've missed a few.
In Facebook's case, they are being run by nobody. Never witnessed a more haphazard, disorganized company before working there. Truly frustrating place to work at, ruled by people with no vision and managed through a Kafkaesque system designed to create conflicting incentives for teams supposed to collaborate. I don't miss it at all.
Ever heard of a hyperbole?
Discord, too.
Once, in a tech interview a long long time ago, the hiring manager asked me some questions about my experience and how I would do this and that... and I gave him my answer and he said:
"Good, I am so tired of hearing from these young folks coming in and saying "well, the way we did it at Facebook was XYZ" and "Facebook does it right by doing it like this" and "FB this and that"
"these kids think they know the best way to do everything because they did something one way, one-time at facebook - and it was their first job, they have no wisdom."
---
The company; Twitter.
I mean, isn't Facebook just a xerox of MySpace?
Finally, a podcasting service aimed at seniors.
That smart and savvy HNers are calling a closed audio medium "podcasting" means that the only important open medium for audio and video distribution is dead. Embrace, extend, extinguish works.
"Podcasting" was coopted by Apple and put to their closed iTunes store almost immediately, haha
Podcast Directory in iTunes Music Store is from... 2005
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2005/06/28Apple-Takes-Podcast...
Your comment proves my point, which is that smart and savvy HNers simply do not understand (and maybe don't care) about companies like Spotify and Facebook misrepresenting their proprietary audio platforms as "podcasting" in their efforts to kneecap and devalue standards-based media distribution. That makes me sad.
Apple Podcasts is a real podcast app. You can open any standard podcast feed in the app and manage it like any other podcast. When you play a podcast, it plays the media as distributed by its creator(s). And when you do, the creators get the data.
As you indirectly note, Apple is mostly responsible for the childhood and adolescent growth of podcasting as an open medium. If they do abandon real podcasting in favor of a proprietary-only, audio-only platform like the ones you're apparently rooting for, I'd guess that they'll be the last to go down.
Along with censorship compliance and centralization. Just what podcasting was missing. /s
Hard pass.
The way how they messed up their video offering is a damned shame.
Plus... why would i want to put my stuff into Facebook's stratospheric walled garden, where if I need to pull it back out later on, its almost impossible???
where if I need to pull it back out later on, its almost impossible???
Or, in my wife's case, actually impossible.
She's tried repeatedly for almost a year to download "her" data from Facebook. All she gets is a 4GB zip file that when uncompressed has a bunch of mostly empty folders and a 3.5GB "facebook_754893.zip.enc" file. By the filename, I guess it's an encrypted zip file, but nothing will open it. Searching the interwebs shows lots of people with the same problem, but no solutions.
If she was in the EU, she'd raise a stink. But being American, she's S.O.L.
Assuming she would have actually got the data to open, what would you have done with that data? I don't think any service accepts facebook data and convert it into their account. And to me facebook seems like a at the moment conversation platform rather than something I would care to archive or look back into.
Genuinely asking the reason people value downloading their fb data so much.
Assuming she would have actually got the data to open, what would you have done with that data?
It's a decade's worth of photographs, so she would have saved it to her computer.
Do we need a volunteer service where Europeans can take over ownership of an account and shut it down / export data?
Financially it makes sense for Facebook to keep cloning products because it pays for itself when it works out (Instagram Stories) and there are no regulations or other penalties for doing it.
More than that, knowing that Facebook is willing to throw tens of millions into cloning your product and pushing it to their 2 billion users makes it difficult to start a competing product. Even as a loss leader to kill competition, it's well worth it.
So…the Clubhouse hype has passed and now there’s an alternative from the worst company in the world?
Yeah…that’ll work well.
It doesn't have to work well. It only has to work good enough to damage the existing competition, and scare newcomers from even trying.
Starting today "Everybody and their mum has a podcast" is more than just a figure of speech.
Given the level of censorship Facebook has been partaking in I’m going to give this a hard pass.
As I have stated before [0], can anyone tell me how Clubhouse is somehow worth $4B? with around 2 million users? It appears that as soon as they have released the Android app in early May, almost all the competitors have caught up and already ate their breakfast, lunch and dinner.
The only ones active on there are the VCs themselves spamming the notifications. Now we have Facebook launching their own Clubhouse-like service, it looks like there is no way out for Clubhouse to compete against the clones is there?
Now my mum may launch a podcast.
Wondering if this would also be full of social media specialists, 'millionaires' telling how to become one, etc.
This is wdb, and I finished talking.
The pockets are turning out lint, Mark.
Will we able to earn from this service?