2021 was a decline for Clubhouse from a peak of 9,600,000 downloads in February to just 719,000 in May 21

Like most others I joined Clubhouse too. I came in to listen to what celebrities like Musk and Naval were talking about. Initially most of it was about Clubhouse and the pandemic. Then the topics I started to see became irrelevant and overwhelming. I also didn't see much value in joining live with people I didn't know.

However Twitter Spaces seems to have addressed some of those problems. Here's my take on what went better -

Being engaged live is hard

Participating live takes up a lot of attention. One needs to take time and attention away from everything else and that's a lot to ask.

On Clubhouse, live was the only option. It required me as a user to open the app after deciding that i'm going to take part in a live event and this adds friction.

Twitter on the other hand removes the barrier to entry because my motivation to open twitter is tweets, which are bite size and consumed passively. While I'm on the platform, twitter makes it easier to discover spaces through little bubbles on the top, allowing me to ease into an engaged experience.

What could have Clubhouse done differently? - Had they populated my feed with replays of topics I'm interested in (similar to a podcast) while reducing my choice overload by showing fewer live spaces, likely my barrier to entry could have significantly reduced.

Topics are often vague and niche

Clubhouse presents a list view with a variety of topics and most of them are irrelevant. There were no ways to curate my feed and they are not that intuitive now.

Twitter spaces, on the other hand, uses the thumbnail of people I follow to bring focus on the people and not on the topic. This way even if the topic isn't as relevant, I'm more likely to participate to learn what they are talking about.

This also removes the dependency on creators to create hyper specific spaces, only which I would be interested to participate in.

What could have Clubhouse differently? - They could have separated out the discovery aspect to a new window, while showing only curated content on the homescreen making it more relevant.

Drop in audio is unnatural

When was the last time you barged into a room where people were discussing a topic and joined abruptly? Drop-in audio, as popularised by Clubhouse, wanted you to do exactly that. Also, there were no replays so if you entered midway or towards the end, there's not much you'd take from it as a listener either.

Twitter spaces on the other hand, has two indicators that makes it better - (1) ‘Recoding’ indicator to show the space is being recorded (2) ‘Streamed ago’ time to show how long ago it was streamed for replays.

Having these on the interface makes it easier for me to know that a replay will be available and how long ago it was streamed in case I were to listen to it passively, and engage in a conversation later on twitter if I wanted.