1/n I spent a lot of time on @joinClubhouse when it first started. It's been fun seeing how the services has changed as it has scaled 100x. Super notable how diverse the user base is, especially relative to 6 months ago when it was highly male, white and asian, and tech leaning.

2/n I regard that as extremely positive - Black Twitter, Black Vine, Black Tiktok were all things early in the lives of those platforms as underrepresented communities are early adopters of new social and media platforms where their voices are not crowded out.

3/n Since so much of US pop culture has its roots in African American pop culture, African Americans tend to be early adopters for social media apps. High representation presages broader adoption.

4/n Kudos to the team to deliberately and thoughtfully create a diverse set of users. Social/viral/invite only products risk propagating only the early user base and user culture unless actively managed. Witness @reddit, @pinterest etc.

5/n Back when I last used the app frequently there were 1000s of DAU. Now its 100ks, so 2 orders of magnitude more. Back then @pdavison was talking about a scaling model based on dinner parties, implying that you'd see 2 orders of magnitude more rooms to get to this scale.

6/n It looks like it has actually scaled more on the room size as there are rooms with thousands of concurrent listeners, so more of a talk radio model to scale vs dinner party. There may be a lot more rooms than I see though given the discovery model based on the graph

7/n The old model was this "salon" style with reasonably high ratio of talkers to listeners, but now it's clearly media for the biggest rooms (with the bulk of total users?), with a low ratio of talkers to listeners.

8/n And interestingly the topics that drew the most interest could broadly be characterized as "self help" including investment advice (incl crypto), business building, health & fitness etc.

9/n Which seemed to attract a lot of self promotional speakers, as can be seen from speaker bios; quite a bit of puffery and lots of affiliate marketing type/get rich/thin/famous quick types. Neither feature nor bug, just notable

10/n This differs from the "entertainment" use cases that you see in other audio platforms like Podcasts and Radio (incl music) which are more passive by definition. Even differs from morning, daytime and nighttime talk shows which is more "inform/news" and "entertain" in nature.

11/n So awesome to see the fast pace of evolution of a new model for social; informed by the past but building their own way. Not everything is perfect - it's really hard to moderate for crazy talk in real time. But seems like the team is using user culture to a positive tool.

12/12 @Twitter has announced their intent to copypasta but their existing user culture and graph will lead them to a different end point.

And re Social, as they say on the Iron Isles of Westeros:

"What is dead may never die.

But rises again harder and stronger."