HACKER Q&A
📣 slymerson

Is Social Audio Dead?


Clubhouse succeeded when it came out due to timing (COVID), and also because of the novelty of a new medium.

Audio had never been used before as a social medium (at least to my knowledge?). However, it has dramatically slowed down and isn't anywhere near the top social platforms, mainly due to how easy it was for these big platforms to copy Clubhouse.

This begs the question: is social audio dead?

It seems to me that it's the only medium left that hasn't been fully capitalized in. For example, how TikTok capitalized on video.

What do you guys think?


  👤 zenosmosis Accepted Answer ✓
I think that it has a lot of potential, but too much "social" anything seems more like an effort to collect a bunch of user data rather than deliver a product that people actually want.

Once someone makes the effort to build an actual tool (think, a "hammer that doesn't require the builder to log in, in order to build a house") that is actually useful w/o massive data gathering, that's where the gold lies.

Unfortunately, it seems not many people are in that mindset when they build a product.

Which is why every social network is fueled by ads.

The least common denominator path of least innovation resistance.

Will such a path lead the creator to massive income? Probably not, unless the creator is smart enough to build on top of it. (i.e. WebKit is open source, and Apple uses it to monetize certain types of apps)

So, no, I don't think social audio is dead at all.

The practice of massive, non-transparent data collection is what's dying.


👤 prenoob
Sorry for being pedantic but social audio is basically the telephone system and is more or less fully monetized.

👤 ninethirty
Social audio is chatting while playing Fortnite I think.