Not very online enough. But really, i think it's more about your online influence sphere. I've been on the intersection and seen a side where it's big, the other where it's not even felt.
I'm still struggling for anyone to give me a concrete answer as to why Clubhouse is worth $4B or even $1B at the time. [0] Monetisation-wise, Clubhouse looks like a solution, looking for a problem via hair-splitting a niche which already has been solved 'generally' by everyone else.
It is not early days and Clubhouse looks like it is going to either shutdown or get acquired in the next 5 years.
I think the whole trend started because some vcs thought that their own voices were important and needed to be heard. Looked like a vanity sector overall
Nobody would put the smell of shit over a picture of anything. Electronic olfactory stimulation would cement marketing associations for children aged 0-12. If somebody ever figured out the technical side of delivering smells affordable and instantly, he/she would have subtle influence over people years after they are exposed to the initial entertainment product that built an association and memory in the child.
Yeah, VC's that invested were propping it up, I saw this cycle repeat on there.
1. Some influential investor/entrepreneur/vs/elon musk type would tweet about the app.
2. The tweet would gain traction, news media would pick it up and write a story.
3. News articles were a sign that the app was "popular".
4. Everyone kept harping on about "installs".
Though it appeared that Clubhouse was going viral in popularity. It was really just a media echo chamber fueled by the "installs". People would hear about the app, install it and create an account, then play with it for 5 minutes before never opening the app again. But that mere install caused the cycle above to repeat.
In the end you had a ton of "installs", and barely any active users.
It honestly felt like something being willed into existence by the sheer desire of the VC community trying to create a new channel that was conducive to monetization.
Yeah, but that’s just one part of its local maximum. If crypto didn’t exist, I feel confident the hustle porn, personal finance and entrepreneurship stuff (more “How I Make $1000/mo In Passive Income”-style content and less Startup School) would rush to fill the gap.
The problem, IMO, is the “live” nature of things like Clubhouse/Spaces. Your audience has to be actively engaged at the right moment to get distribution, and even then you’re subject to the randomness that is live content. No ability to edit the boring parts out or add production value.
Something that is like Twitter for Podcasts would be interesting I think. 1-5 minute audio clips designed to be consumed asynchronously, presented in a sort of timeline manner where you could feasibly just hit play and listen for 30m, getting quick hit audio content from 5-10 creators
Imagine informative YouTube videos but without the “what’s up guys in this video we’re …blah blah” sort of fluff. Just straight to the point.
If you mix the creators into a single timeline that sorts of turns it into a voice-only TikTok.
I've been toying with an idea that's more of an async version of the Marco Polo app but for podcast-type content. Async bites of a single podcast episode which may involve one or more contributors continuously adding to the episode/discussion.
Well I wanted to register and use it, but registration was closed. I've subscribed to be notified when the registration will be open again, but notification never came. Later I forgot about it completely.
I never registered for Clubhouse, and forgot about it so completely I can't remember why I wasn't interested. There was a reason but I forgot what it was.
In the meantime I listened to a few interesting current-events discussions on Twitter Spaces, but only by coincidence that I happened to see them as I was browsing right after work. I don't see how anyone can build a business on only this type of content, it's too synchronous.
I am a "very online" industry analyst type and I enjoyed listening to a lot of Clubhouse chats in late 2020. It wasn't all nonsense - there was value to be had, particularly around gathering current thoughts and, sometimes, inside baseball on various topics, technologies or companies, but you had to listen to a lot to get any gold. Podcasts are far more efficient if you're in a sector that has some good ones and if you really want to chat yourself, you'd probably do better to just create your own podcast or attend some networking events.
That said, Twitter is a slightly different kettle of fish. Some of the live OSINT spaces around the invasion of Ukraine were hours ahead of mainstream media and did some amazing work earlier this year. Smaller community groups also seem able to use them productively to organize in a way that Clubhouse didn't seem to allow, perhaps because people already have social graphs on Twitter.
Part of it is the synchronous-asynchronous difference.
Clubhouse requires you to be logged in and listening throughout the whole discourse, most other forms of "social media" (Twitter, Facebook, forums, ...) let you drop in and out.
Clubhouse also fails to scale because only one person can be talking at a time. As the number of people in a room N increases, this becomes an increasing limitation... One of those that any software developer should have been able to tell you about ahead of time.
That's a serious enough scaling problem on it's own but socially some people are real blowhards who never quit talking while other people are more like
and that is all complicated by social dynamics, gender, class, race, hierarchies, power relationships, etc.
That OSINT group for instance with N people could have an output proportional to O(N) if there is no need for coordination between the people, but if everyone is paying full attention to the discussion it is only going to have O(1) productivity.
With regard to the output productivity of the conversation, there's also something to be said about the "narrative control" that limiting speaking to a single person at a time brings.
With voice platforms (including things like Discord, Zoom, etc.), there's always one thread of conversation going on. The meeting is generally a point A to point B discourse where circling back to examine a topic further is awkward and destroys the overall flow. People want to avoid that, so anyone who can manage to dominate the conversation and stop other people from interjecting has the power to effectively manage what comes next. There's a lot of potentially valuable conversations that get lost along the way as a result.
As an aside, I've seen this bleeding into real-world conversations over the past few years as well. Pre- and post-COVID conversations with my peers in college were staunchly different in how they handled side conversations. Perhaps it's just a product of my cohort getting older and more accustomed to the norms of professional communication, but I've noticed far fewer productive side conversations in groups of roughly 7 or more and a much stronger focus on "staying on-topic".
Text-based platforms have long since managed this issue with reply-based systems, threads, and hierarchical, nested conversations (e.g. HN, Reddit, etc.). This is really only possible asynchronously, though. In a voice format, the best you can do is leave to a breakout room or other channel and come back when you're done, but in doing so you're missing out on the conversation in the main thread. Unless we can somehow find a way to work past that limitation, I'm convinced that practically any platform that relies entirely on voice is going to fail to have the reach and community-building effect that something like Discord or Reddit has achieved.
Additionally, all of this also fails to consider the fact that synchronous-only voice is yet another social distractor that demands your attention on someone's terms other than your own. As seems to be the sentiment on HN, I'm pretty staunchly opposed to normalizing yet another consumer of my time as necessary for social acceptance, but perhaps I'm a bad sample of the public opinion.
Apologies if I repeated a bit of what you said here, but the point I'm trying to make is that you're entirely right about the obviousness of this issue. It doesn't take much consideration of the concept to realize that there's an immediate growth problem. Novel as the idea behind social audio might have been, it was doomed from the figurative (and literal) word one.
My son hates on Discord pretty seriously and so do I.
I had fun joining Discords to coordinate play in League of Legends, but there are few things I dread more than the open source project than the open source project that says "join our Discord".
There are numerous problems such as: discords are often divided into way too many sub-rooms, somebody with too much time on their hands is always the first person to introduce the forum to people joining, etc.
Yeah, in retrospect Discord may not have been the best example for the point I was trying to make.
As much as I like what it does right, I also have a lot of criticisms of it. The "too may channels" issue is absolutely real, and it makes a lot of servers overwhelming. It's also not indexable at all, meaning I often have to resort to using the search bar if something isn't pinned. Admittedly the latter of these isn't the worst experience (Discord search outpaces Slack search by a mile in my experience) but the fact of the matter is that finding a specific moment in a conversation in Discord is far more difficult than it is on something like a mid-2000s forum unless threads are required and their usage is enforced.
More important though is the point you made about "somebody with too much time on their hands." Discord definitely pushes the boundaries of asynchrony at times. On bigger servers, it definitely feels like catching up on past messages is less favorable than being online and active as often as possible. This isn't necessarily anything new (while I've never used it, I've heard that IRC occasionally faces a similar issue) but something about it being baked into the nature of the service can feel very invasive at times. I've yet to find a community on Discord that I felt really bonded with outside of people I know IRL or through friends because contribution is far too often king.
Perhaps there are more similarities than I realized between Discord and social audio in the general-use case. Single-stream communication divided up into rooms, favoring of the most active individuals, and an emphasis on synchronicity seem to be common traits between the two. I'm not sure what this could mean for Discord in the future, though.
This is the ultimate problem with Clubhouse/Twitter spaces.
Podcasts exist. And they're already great for 1 way audio communication.
So Clubhouse had to push for N-way audio communication as a differentiator, and it's really hard for that to be useful.
It's really rare for the audience's contribution to be useful. And it's even rarer for the audience contribution to be useful in a way that cannot be done equally as well, if not better, in an associated chat room with a live podcast.
It’s not dead. It was popular because of it’s novelty, and now it’s just another form of communication or content consumption. Unfortunately for Clubhouse, that means that as soon as big social networks copy you, you need to innovate or die. Network effects of bigger social media are too powerful for Clubhouse, so it’s a bit of an unfair fight.
But is there any momentum in the big-network-copycats anyway?
I believe it's not about Clubhouse in particular, but the whole idea, so even if Facebook copies it, it's still a dead-end (but would still do in order to dominate the space and keep users in).
Dead? No. But it's not the wildly popular service that people thought it would be. Clubhouse is mostly a dumpster fire. Someone might figure out the right way to do it, but right now it's a clunky mess of toxic rooms with the occasional substantive conversation.
and mumble, vent, xfire, teamspeak. Social audio isn't dead, it's one of the most consistently good aspects of technology because these idiots haven't figured out how to ruin it by trying to monetize the social aspects of it. I've spent my evening in a voice chat for the last 20 years, it's a solved problem.
For me, Clubhouse went from an exclusive party of real-name people I wanted to meet to an open party with lots of pseudonymous/anonymous accounts.
Especially on a live social audio platform, which requires so much of my attention, I wanted to know who I was talking to and be excited to meet them, and that became harder and harder.
The general rule of thumb, is that any headline that ends in a question mark is answered by "no," but I think that this one is "yes."
Clubhouse, Marco Polo, etc. have not been very compelling; for different reasons. I think Clubhouse couldn't compete with video broadcast media, like TikTok, and Marco Polo also couldn't, but because it is one-to-one, without social "scoring."
Also, the Clubhouse app wasn't very good, and was iOS-only. I think that it’s a good example of one that should probably have been done via a hybrid system.
I think that, if we will release a native platform app, it needs to be absolutely top-Quality. No compromises. That's the case for the app I'm writing now.
What prevented Clubhouse from quickly devolving into an ersatz Discord. I feel like the audio chat capability + community management was already there.
It took only a moment to realize that Social Audio is about as healthy as Instagram: it's groups of people promoting themselves. If you want to have a call with your friends, that already exists. If you want legitimate information, you have podcasts. There are conferences, panels, etc. Clubhouse got the hype right, but the "market fit" wrong.
Social audio has the same problem of an audio message: it comes always in the moment you cannot listen to it. Even worse, a message from a friend or relative has much bigger priority.
I feel like Clubhouse fell bang in the "This is a feature, not a product" [1] hole and have simply not been able to get out of it, esp once other apps came up with their own live-audio functionality (and given how Twitter and Clubhouse were very closely entwined, the launch of Twitter Spaces and Twitter pushing it quite aggressively was probably the nail in the coffin).
Honestly though, I always felt like live audio was just a pandemic-era overhyped field[2] which still needs a few years in the sun before becoming ready for primetime, because the current implementations do not really bring anything fresh (or useful imo) to the table that other forms of communication don't bring with them (be it Youtube livestreams or podcasts or whatnot)
[2] And it's not just limited to Clubhouse, but also region specific apps like Leher (https://leher.app/) which pivoted from social audio to some weird "do tasks to earn money" model
When your primary means of user acquisition is via somebody else's social network then this will always happen. Clubhouse built a neat little feature and then tried to leverage Twitter to get people to use it. But then Twitter just built it themselves and took all the lunch money. This has happened numerous times. Another high-profile example was Meerkat/Periscope. The best you can hope for is to be acquired/acqui-hired by said social network a la Periscope. But that's very rare.
It's definitely a feature, not a product. I've listened to a few of the live discussions on Twitter between experts in the Ukraine War (e.g. Michael Kofman and Rob Lee were in it), and definitely found that worthwhile. It was, essentially, a live podcast, that took some live questions.
So unlike some of the other commenters in this thread, I do think it has some value and isn't just for VCs' vanity, but it also just feels like a feature. I would never go out of my way to a site that only does this, but when I see a notification of a live stream when I'm already using Twitter, and the subject sounds interesting, I might join.
To be honest most of them start out as features. Their hope is to quickly add enough adjacent features, to retain users by keeping them engaged, surrounding an anchor use case before a competition rolls out their anchor use-case as a feature.
Any parasocial relationships[1] have to be one way to be effective at mass scale. You can't have all of a person's fans talk at the same time. Podcasts are a form of social audio that scales well. Anything that lets someone talk 1:1 with their fans is going to have to have a rate throttling mechanism.
For a while, the obscurity of a platform itself serves as that rate limiter. However, once it kicks off something must replace it, such as pay to meet, or recreating obscurity by random un-announced appearances, etc.
There are two fundamental problems in mass communication. One is easy, the second is hard.
The easy one is transmission at scale. That is, how does one voice reach many. The forum, the printing press, radio, and television all address this problem.
The hard one is feedback at scale.
There's a profound truth hidden in the adoption of the term "broadcast" to describe radio and television, adopted from agriculture, in which a farmer cast seed grain broadly, and, after some cultivation and tending, harvests the result. The fact that this applies most especially to staple grain crops, in which the key to harvesting is to not treat each individual plant as its own special snowflake. For broadcast media, the harvesting mechanism eventually turned out to be advertising.
It's also interesting to see how scaling feedback has been an ongoing problem with the tech sector. It's easy for a small team to create a tool used by millions or billions of people. It's hard to assimilate feedback from that community in ways that truly add to the value of the product. Mechanisms such as A/B testing often cannibalise long-term value to provide a very short-term, small-scale boost.
In live-lecture formats, I find Q&A sessions to be hugely variable. The best seem to come from small and cultivated audiences, most especially where questions are submitted (usually in writing) and selected for presentation. The worst are both general audiences (questions seem to reflect shallow familiarity with the topic), or `cultivated but politicised groups, in which questions are far more often grandstanding performance art presentations.
Wikipedia's article on scholasticism has a description of the lecture format used at the time, which has long struck me as one that would be interesting (and challenging) to implement in an onlyline sense:
- Lectio: the reading to be considered.
- Meditatio: a time for contemplating what was read.
- Questiones: a discussion of written submitted questions, with controvertial questions being addressed in Disputationes.
These were probably sessions with a small group of ~10--15 students, roughly the size of a modern college seminar. Intimacy and familiarity seem key to this, and are the precise opposite of scaling.
189 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadIt is not early days and Clubhouse looks like it is going to either shutdown or get acquired in the next 5 years.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883362
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISmell
https://www.wired.com/1999/11/digiscent/
https://thehustle.co/digiscents-ismell-fail
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17476460
Olfactory memory is exceptionally strong[1], and if a marketer could successfully tap into it, I imagine very positive outcomes.
[0] https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/prolitec-reinvents-ambien...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_memory
1. Some influential investor/entrepreneur/vs/elon musk type would tweet about the app.
2. The tweet would gain traction, news media would pick it up and write a story.
3. News articles were a sign that the app was "popular".
4. Everyone kept harping on about "installs".
Though it appeared that Clubhouse was going viral in popularity. It was really just a media echo chamber fueled by the "installs". People would hear about the app, install it and create an account, then play with it for 5 minutes before never opening the app again. But that mere install caused the cycle above to repeat.
In the end you had a ton of "installs", and barely any active users.
Crypto at least gave it a chance.
Something that is like Twitter for Podcasts would be interesting I think. 1-5 minute audio clips designed to be consumed asynchronously, presented in a sort of timeline manner where you could feasibly just hit play and listen for 30m, getting quick hit audio content from 5-10 creators
Imagine informative YouTube videos but without the “what’s up guys in this video we’re …blah blah” sort of fluff. Just straight to the point.
I've been toying with an idea that's more of an async version of the Marco Polo app but for podcast-type content. Async bites of a single podcast episode which may involve one or more contributors continuously adding to the episode/discussion.
Does anything like either of these exist already?
I read the entire article without learning what social audio or Clubhouse are.
The obvious competitors are:
- scheduled radio talk show. They may be inane but they're professional and consistent
- recorded podcast: has the major advantages of being listenable on your own schedule and possibly well-edited
- youtube: same as podcast, but with video as well
- youtube live: the chat allows more people to participate simultaneously than folks trying to get airtime
- discord: it's live and you might even know or get to know all the participants
That's a lot of competition and not much in visible advantages
In the meantime I listened to a few interesting current-events discussions on Twitter Spaces, but only by coincidence that I happened to see them as I was browsing right after work. I don't see how anyone can build a business on only this type of content, it's too synchronous.
That said, Twitter is a slightly different kettle of fish. Some of the live OSINT spaces around the invasion of Ukraine were hours ahead of mainstream media and did some amazing work earlier this year. Smaller community groups also seem able to use them productively to organize in a way that Clubhouse didn't seem to allow, perhaps because people already have social graphs on Twitter.
Clubhouse requires you to be logged in and listening throughout the whole discourse, most other forms of "social media" (Twitter, Facebook, forums, ...) let you drop in and out.
Clubhouse also fails to scale because only one person can be talking at a time. As the number of people in a room N increases, this becomes an increasing limitation... One of those that any software developer should have been able to tell you about ahead of time.
That's a serious enough scaling problem on it's own but socially some people are real blowhards who never quit talking while other people are more like
https://mlp.fandom.com/wiki/Fluttershy#Shyness
and that is all complicated by social dynamics, gender, class, race, hierarchies, power relationships, etc.
That OSINT group for instance with N people could have an output proportional to O(N) if there is no need for coordination between the people, but if everyone is paying full attention to the discussion it is only going to have O(1) productivity.
With voice platforms (including things like Discord, Zoom, etc.), there's always one thread of conversation going on. The meeting is generally a point A to point B discourse where circling back to examine a topic further is awkward and destroys the overall flow. People want to avoid that, so anyone who can manage to dominate the conversation and stop other people from interjecting has the power to effectively manage what comes next. There's a lot of potentially valuable conversations that get lost along the way as a result.
As an aside, I've seen this bleeding into real-world conversations over the past few years as well. Pre- and post-COVID conversations with my peers in college were staunchly different in how they handled side conversations. Perhaps it's just a product of my cohort getting older and more accustomed to the norms of professional communication, but I've noticed far fewer productive side conversations in groups of roughly 7 or more and a much stronger focus on "staying on-topic".
Text-based platforms have long since managed this issue with reply-based systems, threads, and hierarchical, nested conversations (e.g. HN, Reddit, etc.). This is really only possible asynchronously, though. In a voice format, the best you can do is leave to a breakout room or other channel and come back when you're done, but in doing so you're missing out on the conversation in the main thread. Unless we can somehow find a way to work past that limitation, I'm convinced that practically any platform that relies entirely on voice is going to fail to have the reach and community-building effect that something like Discord or Reddit has achieved.
Additionally, all of this also fails to consider the fact that synchronous-only voice is yet another social distractor that demands your attention on someone's terms other than your own. As seems to be the sentiment on HN, I'm pretty staunchly opposed to normalizing yet another consumer of my time as necessary for social acceptance, but perhaps I'm a bad sample of the public opinion.
Apologies if I repeated a bit of what you said here, but the point I'm trying to make is that you're entirely right about the obviousness of this issue. It doesn't take much consideration of the concept to realize that there's an immediate growth problem. Novel as the idea behind social audio might have been, it was doomed from the figurative (and literal) word one.
I had fun joining Discords to coordinate play in League of Legends, but there are few things I dread more than the open source project than the open source project that says "join our Discord".
There are numerous problems such as: discords are often divided into way too many sub-rooms, somebody with too much time on their hands is always the first person to introduce the forum to people joining, etc.
As much as I like what it does right, I also have a lot of criticisms of it. The "too may channels" issue is absolutely real, and it makes a lot of servers overwhelming. It's also not indexable at all, meaning I often have to resort to using the search bar if something isn't pinned. Admittedly the latter of these isn't the worst experience (Discord search outpaces Slack search by a mile in my experience) but the fact of the matter is that finding a specific moment in a conversation in Discord is far more difficult than it is on something like a mid-2000s forum unless threads are required and their usage is enforced.
More important though is the point you made about "somebody with too much time on their hands." Discord definitely pushes the boundaries of asynchrony at times. On bigger servers, it definitely feels like catching up on past messages is less favorable than being online and active as often as possible. This isn't necessarily anything new (while I've never used it, I've heard that IRC occasionally faces a similar issue) but something about it being baked into the nature of the service can feel very invasive at times. I've yet to find a community on Discord that I felt really bonded with outside of people I know IRL or through friends because contribution is far too often king.
Perhaps there are more similarities than I realized between Discord and social audio in the general-use case. Single-stream communication divided up into rooms, favoring of the most active individuals, and an emphasis on synchronicity seem to be common traits between the two. I'm not sure what this could mean for Discord in the future, though.
There is also a genre of Youtube video that competes with podcasts. Channels like
https://www.youtube.com/c/BattleshipNewJersey
and
https://www.youtube.com/c/Defunctland
have good visuals but have stand-alone audio tracks and make great background noise when you are doing something else.
Podcasts exist. And they're already great for 1 way audio communication.
So Clubhouse had to push for N-way audio communication as a differentiator, and it's really hard for that to be useful.
It's really rare for the audience's contribution to be useful. And it's even rarer for the audience contribution to be useful in a way that cannot be done equally as well, if not better, in an associated chat room with a live podcast.
- No slot machine psychology and adhocracy
- Low information density inflates usage time
- Vanity barrier between speakers and listeners
- No evergreen content / Indexability
I believe it's not about Clubhouse in particular, but the whole idea, so even if Facebook copies it, it's still a dead-end (but would still do in order to dominate the space and keep users in).
Always thought it was just me. Apparently it really was a hype. At least in that form of it.
Especially on a live social audio platform, which requires so much of my attention, I wanted to know who I was talking to and be excited to meet them, and that became harder and harder.
The general rule of thumb, is that any headline that ends in a question mark is answered by "no," but I think that this one is "yes."
Clubhouse, Marco Polo, etc. have not been very compelling; for different reasons. I think Clubhouse couldn't compete with video broadcast media, like TikTok, and Marco Polo also couldn't, but because it is one-to-one, without social "scoring."
Also, the Clubhouse app wasn't very good, and was iOS-only. I think that it’s a good example of one that should probably have been done via a hybrid system.
I think that, if we will release a native platform app, it needs to be absolutely top-Quality. No compromises. That's the case for the app I'm writing now.
From my perspective it clearly was not.
I think that was a feature not a bug. Strengthened the FOMO.
Honestly though, I always felt like live audio was just a pandemic-era overhyped field[2] which still needs a few years in the sun before becoming ready for primetime, because the current implementations do not really bring anything fresh (or useful imo) to the table that other forms of communication don't bring with them (be it Youtube livestreams or podcasts or whatnot)
[1] https://www.yannickoswald.com/post/the-hottest-question-in-v...
[2] And it's not just limited to Clubhouse, but also region specific apps like Leher (https://leher.app/) which pivoted from social audio to some weird "do tasks to earn money" model
So unlike some of the other commenters in this thread, I do think it has some value and isn't just for VCs' vanity, but it also just feels like a feature. I would never go out of my way to a site that only does this, but when I see a notification of a live stream when I'm already using Twitter, and the subject sounds interesting, I might join.
For a while, the obscurity of a platform itself serves as that rate limiter. However, once it kicks off something must replace it, such as pay to meet, or recreating obscurity by random un-announced appearances, etc.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction
This.
There are two fundamental problems in mass communication. One is easy, the second is hard.
The easy one is transmission at scale. That is, how does one voice reach many. The forum, the printing press, radio, and television all address this problem.
The hard one is feedback at scale.
There's a profound truth hidden in the adoption of the term "broadcast" to describe radio and television, adopted from agriculture, in which a farmer cast seed grain broadly, and, after some cultivation and tending, harvests the result. The fact that this applies most especially to staple grain crops, in which the key to harvesting is to not treat each individual plant as its own special snowflake. For broadcast media, the harvesting mechanism eventually turned out to be advertising.
It's also interesting to see how scaling feedback has been an ongoing problem with the tech sector. It's easy for a small team to create a tool used by millions or billions of people. It's hard to assimilate feedback from that community in ways that truly add to the value of the product. Mechanisms such as A/B testing often cannibalise long-term value to provide a very short-term, small-scale boost.
In live-lecture formats, I find Q&A sessions to be hugely variable. The best seem to come from small and cultivated audiences, most especially where questions are submitted (usually in writing) and selected for presentation. The worst are both general audiences (questions seem to reflect shallow familiarity with the topic), or `cultivated but politicised groups, in which questions are far more often grandstanding performance art presentations.
Wikipedia's article on scholasticism has a description of the lecture format used at the time, which has long struck me as one that would be interesting (and challenging) to implement in an onlyline sense:
- Lectio: the reading to be considered.
- Meditatio: a time for contemplating what was read.
- Questiones: a discussion of written submitted questions, with controvertial questions being addressed in Disputationes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism#Scholastic_instr...
These were probably sessions with a small group of ~10--15 students, roughly the size of a modern college seminar. Intimacy and familiarity seem key to this, and are the precise opposite of scaling.