Making the Clubhouse hallway more relevant with machine learning
blog.clubhouse.comHello whomever from clubhouse is promoting this blog post on the internet. Looking forward, please consider adding more technical depth to the content.
This is meant to be a technical blog post and the only technical description of the system/model pipeline involves telling us its a GBDT. That's unfortunately probably the least interesting thing you could pick out to say about such a recommender.
The content briefly touches on real time features and building a feature store. Tell us about that. Tell us about how you measured the improvement of adding near real time features. Explain how this stateless microservice scales horizontally. Tell us about tail latencies while ranking hundreds of rooms for a user. Just something.
Fair point! The Clubhouse room about this goes into more technical depth: https://www.clubhouse.com/room/xe72WW1G
I'm happy that the Clubhouse format hasn't caught on.[1]
- I hated listening to discussions at specific times and having to schedule my time around it, missing out when something happened in another time zone, etc.
- I hated not being able to rewind when I misunderstood something, not being able to pause and think, not being able to return to something afterwards for reference.
- I hated the inaccessibility of it.
For audience participation I much prefer a podcast which is recording with a live chat room or a twitch stream that is saved as a VoD.
I don't think this trend of making content available only temporarily (seen also in Instagram/Facebook stories) is even good for privacy - if it makes people feel they can share something they normally wouldn't.
[1] I know about Twitter Spaces, but I haven't come across any yet. When Clubhouse came, suddenly everything around me was happening on Clubhouse.
I don't generally root for things to fail, but this one was so obviously user hostile in terms of UX and manufactured exclusivity that I'm really glad it's over.
> I know about Twitter Spaces, but I haven't come across any yet. When Clubhouse came, suddenly everything around me was happening on Clubhouse.
This is very much because of your specific social network, and I'm wildly intrigued to know more general notes about it out of curiosity.
Yes, for sure. I think my experience is mostly because of my location. I live in a country where twitter isn't popular. I basically read tweets of only @elonmusk and @waitbutwhy.
For a few weeks ClubHouse became very popular around here and major serious media, NGOs, etc. were all creating content there (instead of putting it e.g. on their YouTube). That's why it got me worried.
During that time I sometimes tuned into some US rooms as well (e.g. Jason Fried hosted a regular and interesting room), but I always thought that it would work better as a podcast.
Clubhouse reminds me of 2018 when a lot of PR went into trying to make voice search and Alexa Skills a thing.
Of course Twitter Spaces took the wind out of their sails, but what purpose does Clubhouse serve besides being a broadcast megaphone for the already internet-popular 5% of people. Is everyone else supposed to just be the audience, or attempt to chase clout themselves?
Agreed, it really feels like a16z just dumping money into their "investments" to try and make them catch on but haven't actually considered if the product makes sense or if people want it.
Looks like we're at the "personalized recommendations based on extensive user behavioral tracking" phase now. I think every aspiring social app gets here eventually and in my opinion it's ultimately what ruins the whole thing.
> Looks like we're at the "personalized recommendations based on extensive user behavioral tracking" phase now. I think every aspiring social app gets here eventually and in my opinion it's ultimately what ruins the whole thing.
Yeah, personalization like that is one of those things that seems superficially appealing but at best just undermines the tool's usefulness with a solipsistic tendency.
> solipsistic tendency
Beautifully put. The idea that a social network should be personalised is.. well it is as crazy as expecting any social setting to be personalised, really.
I'm sorry but I think Clubhouse is dead
The initial approach for the hallway was simple and reasonable. I'm looking forward to how the machine learning approach will play out. Improving relevancy on the hallway is definitely a worthwhile pursuit. Might even make a great kaggle challenge.
Intuitively I would replace the hallway with a feed of recordings (+ occasional featured live rooms, basically the opposite of the current hallway). While this would de-emphasize the live aspect of the app it would I think help to increase relevancy. That said: I'm sure the team has put more thought into it than I did.
Hey Clubhouse, the longer the profile bios are for your remaining users, the less important any of them are. You won't be able to get the important people back.
Just like an actual exclusive clubhouse, the promoters and celebrities have moved on and you're left with a void of less connected people late to every trend, or those that are completely undiscerning. People that fail at status seeking behavior and people that don't care.
For a place with the name Clubhouse, alongside the initial rollout that was filled with promoters and celebrities, I think this is failure and its time to rebrand.
Are there any public runway estimates for Clubhouse?
I will give them 10 years maximum to either shut down or get acquired by private equity at a lesser valuation or even less than 10 years if Clubhouse and their VCs decide to do a down-round due to their ridiculous and unjustifiable valuation. [0]
Which ever comes first.
Not sure but recuiter reached a out to me last week from clubhouse. I was surprised to see clubhouse was still around.
They raised over 100M. I’m sure they haven’t blown ALL of it yet… but it’s gonna be hard for them to raise more I imagine.
I'm not keep up on these things much anymore but around maybe...4-5 months ago Clubhouse seemed to be the new hotness. What happened?
Twitter released their Clubhouse clone, Spaces. Serves essentially the same function, but is native to Twitter so one less app to download. Hosts have incentive to use Spaces because Twitter allows accounts with larger followings to charge admission to Spaces.
Clubhouse could be at feature parity now, but for existing Twitter users, there's very little reason to start replicating their networks on Clubhouse.
Clubhouse tanked before Twitter spaces were a thing
Both companies missed the mark here
Twitter did not.
It can be argued that Clubhouse didn't even totally miss it, though I have doubts about their long-term.
Anyway, who do you think did hit the mark?
Content quality << Amount of people. Couldn't sustain itself. One giant spam fest.
Would for sure want some clubhouse swag though .. anyone got any?
They opened to everybody too soon.
I really didn't want to snark at this: I wanted to see something technical and interesting. But it turns out putting "clubhouse" and "relevant" in a sentence together ended exactly as I expected.
And the hall way is still shit! This app has so menny bugs. They can never leve things the same and let people just use the app.