I stopped using it 5-6 months back as most rooms I find were pretty boring or just people arguing about random stuff.
If you still use it, what are some interesting rooms you follow?
In my experience Clubhouse turned into a corpse merely a few weeks after its hype, after that it was just people parading this corpse around because what they saw in clubhouse was based on experiences a very small number of (other) people made on there. Those experiences were never inherent to clubhouse, but solely based on the limited amount of users, and a bit of curiosity among internet celebrities. Something that was never going to scale or keep up in any way.
There are only so many incredible Harvard professors you can randomly meet at night to listen in on them having the most incredible discussion about life and the future.
The moment I took a look (which was pretty early) it was already nothing but scams and spam. And celebrities of varying popularity selling stuff to their audiences.
I never understood what's so special about TED. In my language segment of the internet it's always been portrayed as one of the things you'd learn English for. So I learned the language — more or less — and started watching it. Absolutely disappointing. The vast majority of presentations I've seen are a very light form of popular science — any decent book written by an actual scientist will serve you much better. It's usually a guy (or gal) clowning around before the audience and spending 40 minutes on a subject that can be summarized in two short paragraphs of text.
Have I just been doing it wrong? are there any decent presentations out there?
Yeah I think TED talks are usually way too shallow. Videos in general really.. And they're generally pretty slow to make sure even the slowest person in the audience can keep up so it's pretty frustrating. I prefer written content over video most of the time.
The only kind of presentations I like are the ones at hacker conferences. They tend to be for a highly technical audience and very non-commercial. Just about the tech, not trying to sell anything.
You can find recordings on https://media.ccc.de for example. They have a lot of German content but most of the event presentations are in English.
Sure, technical conferences are another beast entirely (I also enjoy many things at linux.conf.au, including the accent that many of the speakers have for obvious reasons).
Although most conferences are about as shallow as TED talks. TED's been portrayed to me as some kind of a revelation, that's why I'm asking. Maybe they just got worse with time, like almost anything tends to do.
They spread because they make you feel smart. Books don’t make you feel smart as quickly or as easily. People are very bad at estimating how much they learn from a particular source… instead, when you ask someone “How much did you learn from watching a TED talk?” They answer the question as if you had asked, “How good did you feel watching a TED talk?”
The same problem pervades research into teaching. You can’t use student surveys to evaluate teacher performance.
When I read a book once I learn from it, but I miss a lot (understatement!), too. Why would it be any different from a video? What I should like about a TED talk is that its to the point (lunchbreak amount of time so not requiring long attention) and uses a form of humor or cleverness to bring a (or multiple) point(s) across. Such helps with information sticking, forming a long-term memory. Some books do this too, many don't. There's a lot of bad books out there, and a lot of bad videos. The good thing about a video which contains noise is that you can combine the content with something else, and focus on the good parts, but it doesn't help with forming long-term memory because you can only focus attention on one thing (there's no such thing as multi-tasking, just like how a CPU quickly switches; we're single core.). I do this all the time with podcasts, Netflix, etc but not with a book (nor audiobook). A book requires my full attention, even when its boring. I can't put myself to skipping stuff in it, even if its boring, even if its fiction (I'm missing stuff regardless, but not knowingly). Knowingly skipping feels wrong, except quitting. Quitting is always OK, unless its mandatory content from some authority (boss, teacher, mom, child, etc). I feel like a reference to Learning How To Learn (Coursera course) is also appropriate given its a solid foundation on the subject of how to learn, how learning works, and how to improve such. When I went to private high school, the first course day contained similar content, and its valuable. Anyway, a TED talk is IMO meant as a short summary to learn about a subject. If it interests you, you dive deep into it, and people who watch a lot of TED talks are akin to generalists who want to know a little bit about a lot of things (akin to refusing to specialize). Which has its pros and cons. The world needs both, e.g. both 1st and 2nd line helpdesk.
Are you sure you are thinking about TED talks (or perhaps they've changed the format)? Because the selling point of TED talks (not TEDx Talks, which is something different) is that they are 10-12 minutes and to the point. And no matter what you might think of the subject most of them are great masterclasses of clear and precis presentation techniques. You can learn a lot about public speaking and presentation from them.
All that being said TED has gone massively downhill over past few years. When they first started TED really did manage to get some of the biggest names in their fields to give really unique talks. However as they've massively expanded the number of shows they do they've become less and less picky as to who they let on stage. This has led to their 'brand' declining and fewer and fewer prestigious people want to be associated with TED.
any decent book written by an actual scientist will serve you much better.
The whole point of TED talks was never to replace that book. Rather to get you excited enough to pick up that book, especially in a subject you initially had no interest in. In fact most scientists with books use TED as a platform to convince you to read that book.
It's very tedious to watch live as well. The speaking cadence, tone and inflexions are all micromanaged for the entire presentation.
If a sentence is expressed incorrectly the speaker will repeat it again and again until it's perfect. It makes for a high quality video, but the live audience has to suffer through it.
I think it was a wrong move to brand TEDx after TED.
Back in 2012 I watched my first TED video about a guy teaching how to use a paper towel. I didn't realize that was TEDx and not TED, so I avoided all TED videos for several years, and surely missed worthwhile content.
Yes, the Industrie40 club still has very interesting content.
Its not the big rooms. Its the small rooms. There are not constantly available. You just need to find (active) clubs that are right for you and need to follow their content.
With the (not so) new feature of reply, some of those content is available like a podcast. But, of course that is missing the point of participation.
Sounds like Hipsterism via social platform. Not trying to be unecessarily insulting. Just trying to identify the value. Reintroducing fleeting, ephemeral, scarcity of accessibility but but not in an arbitrary formulaic way in large scale tech platforms is interesting. It is inherently the value of "I found the band" and "oh yeah I liked cream cheese avocado salad on macaroni toast" sorts of things though.
There are Figma and live Javascript coding rooms, where everyone gets on and has open access to the same playgrounds. Get's chaotic but generally everyone self organizes.
Nothing really compares to Agora/Clubhouse audio quality.
Footnote: I am a "socialite" and love to talk to new people often.
meant i could not willingly be a part of this but that's just me. instagram/snapchat folks seem to be liking it but not for some time as i have heard. the "euphoria" has kinda died as i had asked a few people who used to clock 14+hours in a single sitting.
Never even bothered with it, they seemed to initially sound as if the missing features were some sort of advanced tech that was going to take a lot of time to build.
When in fact they just weren't able to use Agora's SDK for Android properly. The weirdest thing is that they made it mobile app exclusive, for something which really does not need to be phone exclusive to begin with.
Lol, no. I was in it from March or April of 2020 and I don't know if I've used it at all in 2021. I've used Twitter Spaces a few times, but Clubhouse is dead.
I was excited to try it relatively early on in its popularness spike. I spent I think 3 evenings walking around listening to multiple channels or whatever they're called. Nearly every one seemed to be a snakeoil sales pitch and I just got sickened by it. Deleted it after a week and never looked back.
I too stopped using it. Too much noise, very little signal. There were some interesting parts. Like listen for an hour to get an interesting perspective, story , viewpoint of 5 mins.
It really depends on who was in the room, and the ability of the people on stage to stimulate interesting conversation.
Never managed to get an invite. Seems hard to scale your app and gain traction when interested people can’t even give it a go. I guess the elitism was part of the marketing.
I got my invite (when it was invite only), which was exciting as it felt exclusive. But soon I found that the rooms were mostly around Crypto, Get rich soon schemes. Only a few were truly interesting to me. And the notifications were nagging too. So I turned off the notifications. Soon, I found that I no longer needed the app. Finally uninstalled it.
I think it was a pretty good idea. Not sure where it went awry.
sometimes, mostly for a16z events and local tech events (Vietnam & Southeast Asia). I don't understand and don't follow the hate (overhyped, overfunding, etc.) but I think the app is very smooth and works pretty well for me.
back then there were lots of virtual events from LAUNCH VIETNAM START UP club on Clubhouse, now I think they switch to Zoom events. you can find and join some from LinkedIn as well, like from Tech Founder Institute for crypto startups, or some Sequoia Surge events for Southeast Asia.
I had a week of using it regularly in the evening, including a few german rap battle evenings, which were genuinely amazing and felt really special. There was a special interest group of watch enthusiasts which I found really charming, and also some Pidgin-English rooms I found linguistically entertaining for a while. But I stopped eventually (the amount of crypto/get-rich-quick stuff that other mention was bad, but I'm not sure that wasn't the reason I left as such - there just wasn't enough non-get-rich-related stuff in the end), and haven't been back in six months.
I hosted a room once, which I was really nervous about - I never really felt like I could participate in most of the rooms I was listening in on - there weren't many ins, and joining a voice-call is much harder than posting a message. I wonder if that barrier wasn't a big factor.
I enjoyed it early on (about a year ago) as it was novel and had this sort of "cosiness" to a lot of the chats. I stopped using it as much when my dad had a stroke in late January and I just wasn't in the mood.. but I've since returned a bit and it still isn't clicking for me anymore. A few ideas as to why:
1. A core group of speakers got addicted to it, tended to dominate many of the rooms, and appeared to know each other. So it got a bit samey and boring with them moderating everything.
2. A quantity vs quality dynamic seemed to appear in order to grow following counts and club sizes, which led to non stop lowest common denominator chats. I just went on now and this is clearly still a problem.. "Big Income Opportunities for You in 2022", "Real Relationship Talk", "Networking eLounge".. these sound like email spam subject lines. For me, these topics suck for the same reason on Clubhouse that they would if they were Ask HN topics..
There's probably more to it than that, and I might be being unfair, but those are just my initial gut answers.
At the time Clubhouse was being hyped in Twitter, a startup hired me as a growth engineer (read, social media manager). I went through tons of twitter threads of viral growth case studies. Everyone was so preachy about Clubhouse and Hey.com. They sold the idea that those were the greatest things ever to hit the startup space. The "invite only business with viral fame on twitter" felt like the only way to a sell startup in the 2020-21 era.
Writing this comment now, I feel nothing but hate and bitterness for Twitter's hypocrisy in the dev/hacker circle there. Discovering a good idea or content worth value from twitter is like finding a needle in a bunch of needles.
Eternal September comes for all exclusive services that try to grow wide.
I thought Clubhouse was interesting, just because of how it speed-ran the Quora descent from high-quality, VIP-seeded experience, to absolute Yahoo Answers depravity once it opened up and the unwashed masses poured in.
As far as I could tell the hype was in large part driven by celebrity VCs like Naval and Balaji constantly hyping it as the next stage of social networking and that can only drive people to use it for so long. Numbers have been falling all year since then.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadThere are only so many incredible Harvard professors you can randomly meet at night to listen in on them having the most incredible discussion about life and the future.
The moment I took a look (which was pretty early) it was already nothing but scams and spam. And celebrities of varying popularity selling stuff to their audiences.
The google stats for "clubhouse" paint a picture: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=clubhouse
I feel the same about TED
Have I just been doing it wrong? are there any decent presentations out there?
The only kind of presentations I like are the ones at hacker conferences. They tend to be for a highly technical audience and very non-commercial. Just about the tech, not trying to sell anything.
You can find recordings on https://media.ccc.de for example. They have a lot of German content but most of the event presentations are in English.
Although most conferences are about as shallow as TED talks. TED's been portrayed to me as some kind of a revelation, that's why I'm asking. Maybe they just got worse with time, like almost anything tends to do.
They spread because they make you feel smart. Books don’t make you feel smart as quickly or as easily. People are very bad at estimating how much they learn from a particular source… instead, when you ask someone “How much did you learn from watching a TED talk?” They answer the question as if you had asked, “How good did you feel watching a TED talk?”
The same problem pervades research into teaching. You can’t use student surveys to evaluate teacher performance.
Are you sure you are thinking about TED talks (or perhaps they've changed the format)? Because the selling point of TED talks (not TEDx Talks, which is something different) is that they are 10-12 minutes and to the point. And no matter what you might think of the subject most of them are great masterclasses of clear and precis presentation techniques. You can learn a lot about public speaking and presentation from them.
All that being said TED has gone massively downhill over past few years. When they first started TED really did manage to get some of the biggest names in their fields to give really unique talks. However as they've massively expanded the number of shows they do they've become less and less picky as to who they let on stage. This has led to their 'brand' declining and fewer and fewer prestigious people want to be associated with TED.
any decent book written by an actual scientist will serve you much better.
The whole point of TED talks was never to replace that book. Rather to get you excited enough to pick up that book, especially in a subject you initially had no interest in. In fact most scientists with books use TED as a platform to convince you to read that book.
If a sentence is expressed incorrectly the speaker will repeat it again and again until it's perfect. It makes for a high quality video, but the live audience has to suffer through it.
Back in 2012 I watched my first TED video about a guy teaching how to use a paper towel. I didn't realize that was TEDx and not TED, so I avoided all TED videos for several years, and surely missed worthwhile content.
Also worth learning English for
Its not the big rooms. Its the small rooms. There are not constantly available. You just need to find (active) clubs that are right for you and need to follow their content.
With the (not so) new feature of reply, some of those content is available like a podcast. But, of course that is missing the point of participation.
I have my internet stranger group of friends who are always around for chat. But also love listening to music rooms when I want to discover new stuff.
Essentially I use it for radio as a socially deprived remote worker.
I also created a bot that can talk and speak in rooms that leverages GPT-3 for a bit of fun -> https://lordajax.com/post/Omega-Clubhouse-GPT-3-bot/
There are Figma and live Javascript coding rooms, where everyone gets on and has open access to the same playgrounds. Get's chaotic but generally everyone self organizes.
Nothing really compares to Agora/Clubhouse audio quality.
Footnote: I am a "socialite" and love to talk to new people often.
==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ====
Made a Clubhouse room -> https://www.clubhouse.com/room/MwrYA8YQ
Edit: Sitting in an empty room for 40 minutes now... proves the thread I suppose aha - will wait patiently
Edit 2: Got 1 person so far
Name a vegetable when you come up so I can kick non HN people.
==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ====
meant i could not willingly be a part of this but that's just me. instagram/snapchat folks seem to be liking it but not for some time as i have heard. the "euphoria" has kinda died as i had asked a few people who used to clock 14+hours in a single sitting.
About the topic, glad that Clubhouse hype is over. There are niche communities around the world who are still actively using it.
Also people who don't use Discord or other gaming apps are using it for live game chatting.
When in fact they just weren't able to use Agora's SDK for Android properly. The weirdest thing is that they made it mobile app exclusive, for something which really does not need to be phone exclusive to begin with.
They were both iOS developers as far as I remember and a lot of the code they already had from a few other social networks they'd tried.
That was what I was hoping when I first tried it.
Or something like "Indie Hackers talking to each other".
Or "Digital Nomad audio meetups".
But I never found interesting channels.
Any suggestions?
Here's my Show HN for it, didn't get much attention - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29486307
But IRC on Libera comes pretty close.
It really depends on who was in the room, and the ability of the people on stage to stimulate interesting conversation.
I hosted a room once, which I was really nervous about - I never really felt like I could participate in most of the rooms I was listening in on - there weren't many ins, and joining a voice-call is much harder than posting a message. I wonder if that barrier wasn't a big factor.
1. A core group of speakers got addicted to it, tended to dominate many of the rooms, and appeared to know each other. So it got a bit samey and boring with them moderating everything.
2. A quantity vs quality dynamic seemed to appear in order to grow following counts and club sizes, which led to non stop lowest common denominator chats. I just went on now and this is clearly still a problem.. "Big Income Opportunities for You in 2022", "Real Relationship Talk", "Networking eLounge".. these sound like email spam subject lines. For me, these topics suck for the same reason on Clubhouse that they would if they were Ask HN topics..
There's probably more to it than that, and I might be being unfair, but those are just my initial gut answers.
At the time Clubhouse was being hyped in Twitter, a startup hired me as a growth engineer (read, social media manager). I went through tons of twitter threads of viral growth case studies. Everyone was so preachy about Clubhouse and Hey.com. They sold the idea that those were the greatest things ever to hit the startup space. The "invite only business with viral fame on twitter" felt like the only way to a sell startup in the 2020-21 era.
Writing this comment now, I feel nothing but hate and bitterness for Twitter's hypocrisy in the dev/hacker circle there. Discovering a good idea or content worth value from twitter is like finding a needle in a bunch of needles.
I thought Clubhouse was interesting, just because of how it speed-ran the Quora descent from high-quality, VIP-seeded experience, to absolute Yahoo Answers depravity once it opened up and the unwashed masses poured in.