Why is clubhouse so addicted to notifications?

I learned to be afraid of clubhouse notices. They blow up my phone dozens of times a day, at all times of the day and night.

My childhood neighbor has just joined the app, do I want to welcome them? How about the guy I was on three dates with six years ago? Someone is talking about podcasting. Someone else is discussing crypto (there is always someone talking about crypto). The notifications are constant.

Sometimes I wake up with a stream of notifications about conversations I missed because I was asleep. The worst is when I try to delete a notification and at the same time accidentally tap on it, which causes me to walk directly into the room I was trying to avoid. I cringe at the thought that one day I might accidentally join one of those dreaded “welcome” rooms for an ex or a primary school acquaintance.

It’s not that I dislike Clubhouse, the thrilling soundtrack that has exploded in popularity over the past few months. Even as a somewhat rare participant, I enjoyed many of the conversations I participated in. But the app sends very of notices. Even by the thirsty standards of the Silicon Valley Growth-to-the-Price Award, clubhouse notices are on a whole different level.

Here are some occasions when you can see a notice about clubhouse:

• The moment someone you have saved in your contact list joins the app

• When someone you follow in the app starts a room

• When someone you follow speaks in a room

• When someone you follow is planning a future conversation

• When planning a conversation with a club, follow

• If someone you know calls you to join a room

Sometimes notifications come for no apparent reason: someone you do not know and who you do not follow speaks in a room about a topic you are not interested in and that you have never followed. “The app seems to count me every time someone I follow does something to Clubhouse,” says Jane Manchun Wong, an app developer and Clubhouse user.

A Clubhouse spokesperson pointed to the app’s ‘new user guide’, which states that ‘notifications’ are important in Clubhouse as everything is in order, and we encourage you to manage them according to your preferences. ‘It is noted that users who feel they are receiving too many notifications may change their settings to “very rarely”.

It’s true that the app allows you to adjust the frequency of notifications, ranging from ‘never’ to ‘very frequent’. But even seemingly modest notification settings can result in an endless stream of alerts.

I follow about a hundred users and ten clubs on the app, far fewer than any of my other social media accounts. Still, I get two or three times as many clubhouse notifications as any other app. With in-app notifications set to ‘normal’ – the app’s default setting – I received 50-60 notifications per day, according to my iOS Screen Time reports. When I set the frequency to ‘very frequent’, my daily notifications recorded more than 70. Sometimes I got several notifications within seconds, often about the same conversation. In a single week, I received 414 notifications from clubhouse. That was more than I received from any other social app, and hundreds more than any app except messaging.

Even people who are fairly active in the app are overwhelmed by the number of notifications. So much so that complaining about the frequency of clubhouse notifications has become a kind of meme.

The problem is not only that the constant alerts feel messy and disruptive, but that the nature of Clubhouse and its miss-it-and-them-away chats is that notifications can ultimately be a source of tension. “The amount of notifications is even very high when set to the ‘Normal’ frequency level,” explains Wong, who regularly participates in clubhouse chats. “It sure keeps me informed of what my friends and the people I follow keep my attention, but it keeps me in a constant FOMO state of mind.”

The FOMO dynamics are not an accident. The character of Clubhouse, which requires users to tune in live, takes advantage of users’ fear of missing out. Forget checking your notifications, and then you’ll miss the next Elon Musk moment. This is a tactic that has been particularly successful in recent years when a global pandemic has improved our social lives. At a time when so many people are hungry for social interaction, clubhouse can be a welcome diversion.

However, there are consequences if any information goes overboard with notices, says Pamela Pavliscak, a faculty member at the Pratt Institute and author of Emotionally intelligent design: thinking about how we create products.

“There’s a lot of research on the psychology of notifications and how it makes us feel stressed and overwhelmed,” says Pavliscak. “They make us feel FOMO. It has a physical effect on us that can increase our heart rate and respiration. So there are psychological effects, there are physical effects … there are many potential layers where notifications can disrupt us and in negative ways. ‘

The fact that Clubhouse is so informative is also at odds with the idea that our phones should not ping us at all times of the day and night. Features like Apple’s screen time controls and Google’s wellness tools on Android are due to the growing concern that our devices are receiving too much attention. Facebook and other social media apps were among the main culprits, in part because of their reliance on excessive notifications to keep us addicted to their platforms.

But Facebook offers at least a fine-grained (if somewhat dull) notification settings so you can choose from the ones you don’t want. Twitter, Snapchat, and TikTok provide similarly detailed notification settings. Clubhouse not. You can change the frequency, though the app does not provide an explanation for the difference between ‘regular’ or ‘normal’ notification levels. You can also “pause” all together, but there is no clear way to say: you can not turn off notifications when you connect contacts or mute notifications from specific users.

Granted, Clubhouse is a very different app than Facebook (though Facebook is trying to create its own version of the service). To get started, you do not have to spend a lot of time physically on your screen to use the app. There is also no way to ‘catch up’ if you miss something. But it’s hardly a good reason not to give users more control over the notifications they receive. Just adding more detailed settings can go a long way in making the app feel less spam. It can also reduce our collective FOMO.