A lot of these criticisms are trying to attribute mal-intent to what in reality is almost certainly that the founders aren't super-humans who got everything technically right out of the gate...

Also

> The app has since been banned in China after hosting conversations about alleged Uighur internment camps and other politically controversial subjects, which could clearly have put activists and dissidents at risk.

I see this argument sometimes for apps, and I feel like it should be made more clear that it's the Chinese government putting these people at risk of harm, not the apps.

Asking for security from a super-power state actor as a baseline for creating a social media app means only Facebook, Google, and Twitter get to ever make social media apps.

> The data referred to is all public profile information from our app, which anyone can access via the app or our API.” Davidson was essentially defending “scraping” — the practice of extracting publicly available, non-copyrighted data from the Web. Whether technically a breach or not, the incident has breached the trust of many of its users, who did not reasonably expect their information to be used in this way.

You can do the same thing with every Instagram account or Facebook or <insert basically every social media platform>. The platform is designed for people to be visible and share. You know that whatever you put in your bio can be seen by anyone on Clubhouse in a room you are in, or in search.

I don't see how this can be made private without defeating the whole purpose of the product. And I also don't see how this violates privacy when no such privacy was offered.

> Scraping is the same technique that controversial start-up Clearview AI, popular with law enforcement, has used to amass its facial recognition database.

It's also the same method used by Google to give you search results, like what the hell are we talking about here? Also Clubhouse didn't do any scraping. That's being lost here in this weird comparison.

> The audio app, only available to iPhone users, was designed and deployed with virtually no accommodations for individuals who are deaf, hard of hearing, visually impaired or who have certain other disabilities. Competitors such as Twitter Spaces, while not perfect, at least allow users to turn on captions and share transcripts, among other features, demonstrating that accessibility in audio apps is possible

Yea, because Twitter is a multi-billion dollar public company with an established and experienced engineering organization with top experts in AI. Clubhouse was started a year ago and only just started reaching hyper growth in January.

The contention here is you need to get this all correct out of the gate, which realistically only one of the big tech companies could actually pull off.

> And while it is one thing to ask people to go without their Facebook or Google products and services, now that these platforms have become so embedded in their daily life, it is another to ask them to abstain from Clubhouse. In this moment, before users have a compelling need to be on these platforms (because everyone else is there), and before Clubhouse becomes too big to fail, we still have a choice.

I'm confused, so we don't like that Facebook and Google own all of our digital interactions, but you also need to have Facebook and Google-level resources before it's ok for you to try launching a social media product?

Clubhouse reportedly turned down a $4b buyout from Twitter potentially, doing exactly what people have been saying they wish happened with Instagram or WhatsApp, but still they're doing it wrong.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't, I suppose.