Clubhouse is a vibrant new social network.
Screenshot by CNET
On a Wednesday night, there was a room filled with a handful of people talking about their plants. The ones they have, the ones they want and the ones that are transferred to that big flowerpot in the air.
“Someone gave me an aloe plant two weeks ago, and I’m killing it already,” says one person.
“Welcome to the world of killing indestructible plants,” replied another.
This room does not happen in spite of pandemic protocol. After all, plant parents are not a notorious rebellious crowd. This happens in a brand new app, launched in 2020, called Clubhouse.
Clubhouse, which is still in beta and not yet available to the public, was founded by Paul Davison and Rohan Seth. It is an audio based social platform. You can enter rooms (or create a room) and hear or participate in discussions on topics: how to save your startup idea, the future of marriage, or Clubhouse boring. Rooms generally have speakers, as do conference panels, and moderators. The conversation is in real time, which means you can hear how people inform their opinions on the topic, and you can also raise your hand to throw yours in as well.
“Imagine being in class with everyone in the world,” said Natasha Scruggs, a Kansas City, Missouri attorney who has been on the app for several weeks.
Clubhouse is the latest manifestation of our desire to connect with each other at a time when social distance and home isolation is the new norm. But while video conferencing services like Zoom have been blown up for everyone, Clubhouse’s biggest attraction is the exclusivity and ability to pull in notable figures, including Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook.
This has not always been a good thing. During the summer, Clubhouse got headlines for an incident with Taylor Lorenz, a reporter for the New York Times, who started a debate about Silicon Valley culture and the media about it. It also raises the more serious issue of how the platform handles harassment and questionable content, such as conspiracy theories and anti-media sentiment, that appear in conversations.
The app also drew attention to the famous names that appeared: Jared Leto, Tiffany Haddish and Ava DuVernay, to name a few. Musk showed up in early February to discuss everything from Mars to memes. Zuckerberg made an appearance about a week later and talk about AR and VR in remote work. And with this kind of spotlight also came the kind of juicy internet drama that can not help people with rubber necks, like Tom Hanks’ son, Chet, who becomes paralyzed due to his inexplicable tendency to speak Jamaican pathos.
To borrow a line from Hamilton, Clubhouse becomes the room where it happens.
Join the club
Clubhouse is not the first audio-based app. Even Twitter plays around and lets users insert audio snippets in their feeds. The reason Clubhouse experiences this kind of attention can be for a mix of reasons, including the alleged exclusivity.
“I do not think this exclusivity was part of the design,” said Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter and senior fellow.
Part of the point of a beta is to prevent you from opening doors to the public while still trying to figure out how to make the app work. And yet, sometimes people will want even more to make something exclusive – that’s the thing they can not have.
It’s hard to say how many people are actually on the app, although you can find individual rooms with over 2000 people. To get an invitation, you need to know someone who is already on the app, and who can direct it to you. That person’s face will appear on your profile indefinitely as the person you invited. Android users have no luck at first.
In a July report, Davison and Seth said they want the clubhouse community to grow slowly.
“It helps ensure things do not break, keeps the composition of the community diverse and allows us to adjust the product as it grows,” they said, also noting that their team is small.
Clubhouse also has a hit at a time when personal gathering is dangerous. Because many people are trapped in their homes and apartments, the opportunity to connect with other people from around the world, to hear voices, is attractive.
“Voice is so real,” said Casie Stewart, a social and digital strategist in Toronto who has been on the app for more than a week. “I laughed with people.”
Open
One of the biggest questions surrounding Clubhouse, other than where you can find an invitation, is how it will grow when it opens and how people will use it.
For Silicon Valley acolytes, Clubhouse is a chance to brush elbows with the top layers of Techland, such as Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz (who invested in Clubhouse) and Product Hunt founder, Ryan Hoover. The CEOs of Pinterest, Github and Roblox also have profiles.
This may not always be the case. And to be honest, Clubhouse is not just a place for the Silicon Valley elite to hold court. There are many rooms, from everything from dating and sex to songwriting and the music industry. There are rooms dedicated to the portrayal of black people in film and TV, and to which the Christmas spirit has disappeared. And yes, many for marketing and branding – panels finally find a home after a year without SXSW and other conferences.
Wander Vieira / Getty Images
Stewart said he thinks of Clubhouse in the early days of Twitter. Brian Solis, digital anthropologist and global innovation evangelist at Salesforce, who knows Davison and has been around since the app’s inception, has been repeating it and remembering how people came together to exchange ideas online. He can see parallels with the evolution of events such as SXSW, which have become more intimate and more at home.
Clubhouse has a few more kinks to work through. In a room for new members, people asked one evening to make it easier to find rooms as well as clubs (groups of people interested in a specific topic).
Whether Clubhouse picks it up on a large scale could have a big impact on its post-beta popularity.
“You need to start thinking about what that user experience will look like, so that they can find conversations that are relevant to them at the right time, and also that they can accommodate people and bring them into those conversations. It will find them relevant,” Solis said. .
Silicon Valley drama
Then there is the question of how to deal with harassment, especially if there is not exactly a report to report or take down. And as many other social media networks teach, the question of who decides what kind of speech is appropriate or inappropriate is difficult.
This summer, Clubhouse has so far seen one of its most notable flaps when Lorenz of The New York Times finally came to the subject of a room where venture capitalists boasted about the role of the tech press and especially Lorenz, Motherboard reports. Vanity Fair also expressed concern about anti-Semitic and racist content appearing on the site. Stewart was early in a room where a user began to graphically describe a sexual fantasy before the user started out of the room by moderators.
Audio also presents the challenge of making offensive views disappear once they are uttered, making them difficult to convey. Clubhouse’s community guidelines do mention the ability to report someone in real time, allowing the app to “maintain a temporary, encrypted audio recording in order to investigate the incident.”
“How can you ensure that the, quote, good conversations take place versus bad conversations, and who should be the judge of it?” Li said and also noted that she has been reassured so far by the variety among the user base. “It gives me hope that the best way to moderate is that there are a lot of different voices.”
Outside talks
A place like clubhouse will never be just for individual users looking for advice or companionship.
Marketers and brand specialists are already thinking about what may come next. Li sees that Clubhouse can take advantage of its exclusivity. For example, a brand may host a kind of talk in Clubhouse, promote it on other platforms, and pay Clubhouse to offer invitations to Clubhouse for those who visit it.
‘There is an opportunity for brands to have a roundtable discussion or hold competitions, or [host] talk to experts, ”Stewart said.
Scruggs imagines that clubhouse is a place for live performances, concerts, podcasts and even the home of something similar to the mid-1900s radio series, some of which can be offered tickets. And on a more personal level, Scruggs wants to move towards social responsibility and diversity, focusing on the sports world. Earlier this month, she presented a room called “How Pro-Sports Teams and Athletes Can Practice Significant Activism.” She sees Clubhouse as a way to teach, network and market herself in that space.
“With Clubhouse, you literally never know who’s going to be in a room,” she said.