I more or less gave up on my Clubhouse journey. It was really interesting experiment, but unfortunately it has some drawbacks. For one, the CH team is super unresponsive, they take months to put out features that take minutes to implement. Another reason is that there aren’t many large groups of people interested in a single topic; the startup area is strong, but engineering for example is rife with junior engineers trying to pretend they are senior. Which brings me to the last point, it’s all about posturing and ego.

I think a lot of it comes down to farming follows. If you sit up on stage as a mod in a large room, you will get follows. It’s pretty much a guarantee. Just yesterday “Chris” was up on stage as a mod in a room for Canadians to network. Guess how Canadian is he? Zero. He does this all the time. I have never once heard him speak up in a large room when he was a mod, because he has no value to add. He clearly wants the follows, modding isn’t a difficult task on CH and most rooms only let up a few people at a time.

He’s not alone of course. A buddy of mine “J” is founder, but every every chance to get up there he takes. You can find him sitting on the panel of investors in rooms about investments.

It’s not necessarily a problem, they aren’t harming anyone, but it emphasizes my point that they are just farming follows. And I would say half a dozen people have asked me if “J” is an investor. It leads to confusion, but worse distrust. When people sit up on these stages posturing as experts (actively or otherwise) while being aware they are far from an expert on the topic, they start to think they are fake or frauds. So really all the farming does build distrust and those followers become useless anyway. If 100% of people reached that conclusion it would be fair to say the posturing was all for nothing, except to inflate an ego.

I’m not trying to pick on these people specifically, they are just examples. There is much worse going on. It’s not uncommon to hear people talking out of their ass for the same reasons, which actually can be more harmful. But to clarify, you don’t need to be an expert in something to teach someone who is one step behind you. It can be harmful if you’re on a different staircase altogether though.

In any case, such is Clubhouse. I figured it was worth putting down onto my digital paper, because a few have talked about it in private rooms, and someone has to get the idea out there into the universe.