Leaving Clubhouse for Twitter Spaces

Originally published with images and videos on https://clubhouseconversations.substack.com/p/moving-to-twitter-spaces

If you’re reading this newsletter, it’s because we met through Clubhouse. I spent the past 100+ days deep diving into the buzzy social audio app to learn what’s good and bad about it. At the end of the day, I had to leave the app, because it’s an obvious scam that I can’t support.

The problem is that it’s built “Creator First,” which we saw on full display when CEO Paul Davison launched his Creator First Pilot Season. Although he had over 200 Clubhouse creators involved, I outworked both the creators and Clubhouse staff.

I am the only person who attended all 50 Creator First pilots, and all of them combined got less engagement than an abandoned Pinterest account I own. That really put into perspective just how much of a lost cause Clubhouse is.

The problem is that Paul drills into everyone’s head over and over that he only respects the creators of rooms. But he never ever supports them – any time his assistant Anu would bring up any community issues from the room creators in the Clubhouse Townhall, Paul would snap.

You can hear them for yourself on my YouTube channel going all the way back through February. Paul sounds like an excited child from Leave It to Beaver while announcing all his plans for Clubhouse but then Anu has to ask him to breathe and calm down before she reads the highly filtered complaints that are always the same every week.

Paul refuses to update anything on Clubhouse because he’s creator first, and he’s the Creator. In Clubhouse, Paul is a God within his a16z cult. But as soon as he leaves Clubhouse and enters the real world, he realizes he’s a joke among everyone in Silicon Valley.

That’s why I uninstalled Clubhouse but I’m still stuck with my personal information being held hostage on the platform. Since Paul and his cult are illegally holding my account hostage, I’m using it to promote my new presence on the Twitter Spaces Beta.

Why Twitter Spaces Beats Clubhouse

The problem with Clubhouse is that no celebrity, brand, nor organization wants to rebuild what they already have on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Paul has these dumb ideas of clubs but the majority are empty and long ago abandoned. High-profile club owners from 2020 like Ed Nausbaum are selling their clubs and leaving the platform.

And they’re having trouble doing it because nobody with any common sense wants to buy them.

Clubhouse only feels like a large community because it’s the same thousand people in a constant circle jerk. There’s no real content, and everything Paul built is creator first. It should always have been built listener first, and that’s what Twitter is.

Twitter has been around since 2006, and it saw a lot in that 15 years. Like Clubhouse, it was originally popularized by the black community before a revolution made it a part of the culture. The Arab Spring and Occupy were pivotal moments for Twitter because they showed the power of mass communications.

I’ve been on the platform for a long time, and it’s exactly what Paul needed to build. Clubhouse is just audio, and that doesn’t give any reason for the listener to stay. Listeners are reading tweets, and that’s what Paul wants you to do. It’s because he’s too lazy to build his own version of Twitter, and that’s the messaging system we all needed and wanted.

But it was too hard – Paul doesn’t want to work. He just wants to listen to his cult. And I’m not interested in cults. I’m interested in brand partnerships and fascinating conversations and entertaining performances like you’ll get on Twitter on its next release which will include Stages.

Paul never figured out middle-out, which is the way discoverability works. It’s a series of circles with lines attaching them that allow you to get so much deeper than the flat grid of a SQL database. One SQL cell can only have up to 8 associations, and that’s not enough.

A movie, for example, has more than 8 people in its cast. For Netflix to determine why you like certain movies, it needs to form 1000s of connections regarding genre, length, tone, cast/crew, etc. That’s just not possible in a SQL square cell, and that’s why Paul will never figure out discoverability.

He’ll never figure anything out because he needs a listener-first platform like Twitter for his cult app to exist. It should always have been built listener first. Because it wasn’t, Clubhouse has no listeners. It’s just a bunch of people trying to speak, making it a mod circle jerk.

Just like in the HBO show Silicon Valley, Paul and his team spent all their time and money figuring out the best way to jerk off an entire room of people most efficiently. They should have focused on creating content that’s good for the listener.

The creator first approach permeates everything on Clubhouse, from the business direction to the content to the architecture. It needs to be rebuilt from the ground up but the team already lost trust and has no time nor money nor leadership to do it.

Clubhouse is dead, so join me in Twitter Spaces.

Introduction to Twitter Spaces

Like Clubhouse, Twitter has its own audio app in Spaces. They made the mistake of copying Clubhouse and were building their beta in its direction. Lucky for the Twitter team, I was willing to speak on a Twitter Space on the topic with four of their top leaders.

They tried too hard to compete with Clubhouse and built some incorrect features that are being rebuilt and fixed for the launch. When it hits, the listeners will be removed and everyone in the Space will be a speaker. The listening audience is Twitter. You’ll have the option of creating private “Spaces” and public “Stages.”

Under this framework, you can partner with a brand like DJ Khalid used to do Twitter account takeovers. But instead of him just tweeting, he would be on a Stage within the account broadcasting his DJ set or TED Talk-style presentation to every one of that brand’s fans.

It’s the exact setup Paul wishes he had, but he wanted everyone to build it for him.

Personally, I’m nobody’s slave, least of all Paul Davison’s. So instead of worrying about helping him hold up the house of cards that is Clubhouse, I’m creating Spaces on Twitter. Follow me to join my Spaces. I’m not scheduling them regularly yet, but the Twitter team is working on the scheduling and calendar.

Once Twitter has it all down, I’ll start inviting you all to my regularly scheduled Spaces and Stages. Until then, just follow me on Twitter at @Clubhouse_Convo to learn more. I’m converting this newsletter and the network I built around it to a full audio creator and social audio blog to cover Spotify, Reddit, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and everyone else that’s going to crush Clubhouse.

Even more fun, I’m emailing this to Clubhouse to give them the right answers and let them see it knowing they’re not capable of fixing it in time because it requires Paul Davison to listen.

Anyone backing this $4 billion Clubhouse of cards over $50 billion tech giant Twitter is on the wrong side of history.

Stay tuned…