Thread by @Chronotope

There is little doubt in my mind that brands in-housing their creative teams & the rise of 'social' platforms that push corporate comms like Clubhouse are connected in the same way Forbes letting CEOs write unedited op-eds was connected to the rise of early unmoderated social.

The thing that this is all about is that when the gatekeepers come down in any areas... that is great for minority voices, but it is also great for corporate communications teams to push out viewpoints as if they are journalism and remain unchallenged.

Eventually your platform has to take a stand on if you want to be the next big PR Wire or the next big place for an upswell of creatives or if you want to split the difference into ads and content like Facebook...

I look at Medium and--for all its many faults--I see a platform that is trying to choose not to be a PR Wire. Forbes made the opposite choice. I don't think it has worked out particularly well for either of them and I think most look at that and try to push that decision off.

Being a place where brands looking to have their own voice unmarked & without any pushback is a great place for a platform that's looking for money. But it is basically lighting your brand's credibility on fire and hoping that you can pull the logs out before they are ash.

As shitty as it is, we can already see that brands are 100% ready and capable of extending in-housing to the point of building their own sites, outlets and social networks. They can buy shit traffic from vendors that lie to them and get measurement that lies to them and feel good

So at the end of the day, people will be shitty, racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, etc on Clubhouse and it will create Big Dialogue; but the question that is going to change things is where Clubhouse draws the line between Big Names and Big Brands Talking via Big Names

It should surprise no one that the thing that makes an impact is going to be the big money. As long as Clubhouse remains in Investor Storytime mode it isn't going to moderate, or markup user profiles, or change anything.

But at some point they are going to be forced to choose: do we moderate users based on their language... or on their affiliation...

if I was going to bet: the difficulty of moderating live audio + the shitty attitude of VC-types means they are going to end up in the *extremely* boring position of being PR Wire Audio & we're all going to forget they exist while they fade into a profitable but not big $$$ niche

That's why I think that individual shittyness of people performing on Clubhouse is newsworthy... but the platform itself is boring and not worth reporting on until they're forced to make money. Anything else is just giving it what it wants--making earhole numbers go up.

"streaming live audio platform" is an extremely easy to build system ripe for any new entrant to be ripped off by big players and disrupted by the next VC-funded contestant. I can't find it in myself to care about it until they show they have a real plan to be a business.

I think it freaking sucks though that the corporate socialism of the VC system--that lets companies run for years unprofitably--is a direct, if not the main, cause of the spread of hateful content because you don't need to moderate if you don't have to make money.

VCs could... of course... demand more of the companies that they fund. But they don't. They only want user numbers to go up, regardless of the type of user. So I don't have any particular shock over a class of VCs saying shitty awful stuff either. They enable it every day.

Elitist iOS-only, invite-only, app-only startups bore me. We keep seeing them pop up, we keep seeing the tech press pay attention to them *because* the investor class is constantly propping them up with amplification. TBH, it is getting old and it is getting boring. I pass.

Getting corporate mouthpeaces to speak on your platform isn't impressive. Especially now that corp comms are building tons of internal content & looking to push it out on anywhere that enables it. But it is artificial. VCs will literally stand on any soapbox if it has an iOS app.

Especially because they usually have an investment in the corp and the soapbox at the same time. Lets them inflate their numbers at double the speed.

Call me back when someone with something divisive to say goes on the platform & gets an ad run next to their content.

I really hate the fact that basically the shitty speech is self-funded because VCs with big bucks could light their money on fire and still make money so they can say whatever they want. But at the end of the day... platforms and software can't stay in investor storytime forever

No one can stop the ultra rich from saying shitty things. No one can stop startups from making themselves a foghorn for corporate comms as a temp measure to drive up traffic. But the startup can't live off of that unless the corps start paying, either directly or via ads.

At the end of the day the question is does in-housing have more ROI on self-contained & self-maintained platforms than yours? This is the pressure on every website that makes money online via brand speech or ads right now. What can you offer that can't be replicated?

If you are a flash-in-the-pan startup you got the un-replicable flash, but if you burn your staying power by letting anyone say anything... it ain't going to go well in the long term. So... yeah... call me back when Clubhouse has more than flash & then I'll take it seriously.

Ironically... if you want to destroy the gatekeepers & be a successful business... you end up having to be the gatekeeper in some form. The only way around that is many small unaffiliated personal sites/blogs and promoting a feed reader on your blogroll. Or a company's comms blog

Or demolish capitalism. That's the real laugh. If VCs want to say anything and keep their amplification with no consequences and keep using their favorite tools to amplify their voices, capitalism is working against them.

If you've gotten this far, and you still care about the sort of thing these VCs like to pretend they are doing, but for real real not play play, may I suggest you contribute to the creation of decentralized non-bitcoin/capital-based web tools: patreon.com/paul_maf_and_a…

(the above link is not affiliated with me in any way and have not sponsored this thread. I just think the stuff they are building is great and a potential way out of the conundrum of this sort of mess)