At some point this weekend, Airchat cofounder Naval Ravikant had to close off new sign-ups to his app. After releasing a new version Friday, Airchat was quickly overloaded with people thirsting for a glimpse—or an audio snippet—of Silicon Valley’s newest fad. Ravikant had given a small number of users unlimited invites to share with friends, and it backfired.
“We’ve had an influx of new users, so we’re turning off the invitation capability for a little while,” Ravikant said on Sunday.
Ravikant didn’t say this to WIRED, or on Twitter or Threads. He said it in a short audio post within his own app, accompanied by a transcription. If a voice note drops in a forest and only Silicon Valley’s early adopters are there to hear it, does it make a noise? Ravikant seems confident it will.
Airchat marries the feed aspect of Twitter with the audio-first format of Clubhouse, a daunting combo. After launching the app and being prompted to follow some contacts, you’re put into a minimalist feed of text blocks. These text blocks are actually transcriptions of audio bytes. The app automatically jumps from voice note to voice note, unless you think to tap the Play/Pause button wedged in the lower right corner of the app.
To post an audio note yourself, you hold down the Audio/Video button at the bottom of the app, talk, and let go. (From what I’ve seen so far, no one really uses the Video option.) If you’d prefer not to post publicly, there’s also a DM option. Either way, there’s no typing allowed.
Airchat has confounding elements. Voice notes are posted to the Airchat feed the moment you release the Audio/Video button, so you’d better get it right the first try. There’s an option to delete after you’ve spoken, if you decide you weren’t happy with your byte, but I didn’t notice the trash can icon until someone pointed it out to me. Sorting through multiple responses to a voice note is less than intuitive. You can’t respond to every voice note or see every response in a given thread, and it’s not clear why. It’s also unclear how long a single Airchat message can be; one user told me his limit was 45 seconds, but in a test I was able to record for about a minute before I opted to stop.
And all voice notes play back at 2X speed by default, giving everyone a vaguely hyper, just-woke-up-and-slammed-my-Philz-then-cold-plunged vibe. If you hold down the Play/Pause button in the lower right corner of the app you can adjust the speed, which is, again, less than intuitive.
This new Airchat is apparently a reincarnated version of the app that was released without fanfare last spring. Brian Norgard, the longtime chief product officer of Tinder, had first envisioned it as a peer-to-peer voice messaging app. Ravikant, the founder of AngelList, joined Norgard one year ago and became “super involved” in the app’s development a couple of months ago. Then the new Airchat entered the chat.
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