[skilesare]

There was so much promise. After a year of quarantine I had 5 of my most interesting non work/family conversations of the year in a one week period. There was no real way for me to connect with those people without wading into the morass of twitter or instagram. I tried to build a tool (https://inof.me) to help people connect by providing an invitation and an asking for an offer. No one was really interested...it needed to be integrated into the platform to work. I couldn't block topics. I couldn't search for terms of active channels. I couldn't politely ping interesting people and ask if they'd like to set up a time to chat.

I love talking about decaying currency, certain(non-NFT) blockchain topics, Longhorn football, some philosophy topics, etc and I'll talk to anyone about them most all of the time if I can find a conversation partner(especially during quarantine). I had no real way to make those connection on clubhouse even though I had spoken with interested folks previously.

Most of all, I couldn't catch up. If an amazing conversation happened that you were late to...too bad. You couldn't explore and find if the person speaking was really trustworthy by looking at their back catalogs.

I wanted a clubhouse that lets me pay $9.99 a month to have access to a back catalogs that will let me listen to the interesting conversations that occurred in the past about very long-tail specific topics. Then I want to star those people with different color stars and notification levels so that if they start talking again I can quickly see what kind of conversation it is and jump in. If I'm late I want to back up 30 minutes and listen at 1.75x until I'm caught up. Give me the knobs and dials to customize my experience.

[skellera]

Guy Raz makes a good point in the How I Built This episode with the Clubhouse founders. You can have a really interesting conversation with someone but that conversation doesn’t necessarily make good radio that’s interesting to others.

So much of that catalog would be gurus repeating the same stuff over and over again. It would be so hard to sort through all of it to the find interesting parts.

I think it’s wonderfully interesting to be pulled into the conversations of people I look up to because it feels genuine. But once the masses join the platform, everything becomes so curated to specific topics that it loses the magic. It isn’t any better than a badly produced podcast or blog.

Live audio and video will still be the future but this isn’t it. Or, isn’t yet.