Clubhouse: An intimate chat with up to 5,000 friends
One sign that Clubhouse is Silicon Valley’s hottest app is that “almost every social platform wants to copy it,” said Ashley Carman in TheVerge.com. Clubhouse has attracted nearly 14 million downloads since launching on iOS last March, even though you have to be invited to join. For those unfamiliar (or still waiting for the invite), Clubhouse offers a menu of audio-only “rooms” users can enter to hear live and ephemeral discussions, some featuring “headline-grabbing names such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or Bill Gates.” It’s been such a hit that Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Slack, and Mark Cuban have already “launched or are working on their own attempts at social audio.” Now Clubhouse needs to make sure it’s not left behind as its brilliant idea gets copied.
There has been something very pleasant about letting “strangers’ voices fill my apartment,” said Anna Wiener in The New Yorker. Clubhouse is “best consumed while otherwise engaged.” The conversations are “more diffuse than radio,” and I can “move quickly from room to room.” One day, there might be discussions about Cuba-U.S. relations under the Biden administration, or about the experiences of Asian-American women. There were also 62 people in a room titled “How would you rob a bank?” I like wandering through the rooms, dropping in on the conversations. But it can also feel like “a conference in full swing,” and I’ve started to wonder, “Why did I let all of these people into my house?”
That kind of overload is becoming a problem, said Steven Levy in Wired.
For many early users, “the whole point of Clubhouse was its intimacy.” Now rooms are “routinely hitting the 5,000-person limit,” and with scale come the familiar problems of social media. Critics say misogyny, anti-Semitism, racism, and harassment are common in Clubhouse rooms. Seedier precincts like “Strip Club,” a room for trading naked photos, have also inevitably sprung up.
Clubhouse has “filled a Covid-era void in our social lives,” said Heather Somerville in The Wall Street Journal. It’s restored the kinds of interactions that have disappeared as we’ve been trapped in our homes. From a business standpoint, though, it faces a quandary: “It’s hard to make money from ads on ephemeral content in apps designed to feel intimate or personal.”
That’s why Snap, the maker of the Snapchat messaging app, pivoted to letting users “save content, make posts permanent, and share with a broader audience.” The puzzle for Clubhouse is finding a way to do that without losing the spontaneity that made it attractive in the first place.