Is Clubhouse App the new Social Media Savage?

What is Clubhouse?
Clubhouse is a new type of formal ( and informal ) social media network based on voice. When you open the app, you can see “rooms” full of people talking — all open, so you can hop in and out, exploring different conversations — startups, religion, languages, culture, and philosophy, to name a few. You enter each room as an audience member, but if you want to talk, you raise your hand, and the speakers can choose to invite you up. Or you can create a room of your own. It’s a place to meet with friends and new people worldwide — tell stories, ask questions, debate, learn, and have impromptu conversations on thousands of different topics.

What makes it unique?
The novelty of the app lies in its voice-only make, and this makes it stand out. With no camera on, you don’t have to worry about eye contact, what you’re wearing, or where you are. You can talk on Clubhouse while you’re folding laundry, breastfeeding, commuting, working on your couch in the basement, or going for a run. Instead of typing something and hitting “Send,” you’re engaged in a back-and-forth dialogue with others. The intonation, inflection, and emotion conveyed through voice allow the users to pick up on nuance and form uniquely human connections with others. You can still challenge each other and have tough conversations — but with voice, there is often an ability to build more empathy, which drew the founders to this medium.

Building a Community
According to the Clubhouse team,

We are building Clubhouse for everyone and working to make it available to the world as quickly as possible. It’s not intended to be exclusive; we just aren’t ready to ship the general release version yet. There are two reasons for this:

First, we think it’s important to grow communities slowly, rather than 10x-ing the user base overnight. This helps ensure that things don’t break, keeps the composition of the community diverse, and allows us to tune the product as it grows.

Second, we are a small team, and we haven’t yet finished building the features that will allow us to handle more people. Right now the two of us are the only full-time employees. We’ve benefitted from the support of many, and are actively hiring, but between infrastructure scaling, feature development, gathering product feedback, and general company building, there haven’t been many spare hours in the day. Plus we have four young kids between us jumping on our keyboards as we type! 😅

A community that is there for you
Since its launch, Clubhouse people have shared their joy and dismay about Supreme Court decisions, their feelings of anger and helplessness over the murder of George Floyd, and their struggles navigating the challenges of home and work during COVID-19. There have been rooms with people from all walks of life finding common ground. We’ve seen people host book clubs, fireside chats, passionate debates, and comedy shows. When people have fallen asleep late at night, others in the room have “tucked them in” — quietly sending them back to the audience in order to mute their microphone. People seem to be coming back because it’s a place where they can talk for hours at a time and leave each day feeling better rather than worse, because they’ve deepened friendships, built new ones, and learned something new.

Empowering Moderators and Club Leaders
To avoid conflating abuse with other things that can feel uncomfortable — like differences in opinion or conversational style — or other offensive acts — abuse, racism, religious intolerance, sexism, and hate speech — are not tolerable. Furthermore, targeted and coordinated harassment is never okay and the app brilliantly takes care of that. But what about general rudeness? Or holding opposing political viewpoints? While these things might seem jarring, the app does’t believe that this should be banned. They want to make sure that when one uses Clubhouse, one gets to choose one’s own communities, rooms, and style of conversation. The app enables this by:

• Allowing clubs to set their own norms. Club founders are able to write rules that are specific to their clubs — to share their community values, communicate their norms, and define the dos and don’ts for speaking. When people join the club they’ll be asked to agree to the rules. And when the club hosts a public conversation, non-members will be asked to agree to the rules before speaking. This will help people create intentional gathering spaces that cater to many interests and styles. These rules will supplement the Community Guidelines, which still apply to everyone.
• Hosting formal moderator training sessions. There is no single way to moderate, and each room can have its own style. To help with this, the app offers regular moderator training sessions on the app, to ensure that people who wish to host discussions are equipped with the tools and knowledge they need.
• Improving moderator tooling. Great moderators create great conversations, and the app empowers them with the right tools. It allows the usres to notify moderators when there is a safety concern related to their room. Moderators can also tap the “End Room” button anytime if they feel the conversation is getting out of hand.
• Adding moderator badges. This is a small thing, but it’s easier to provide a speaker with feedback when you know who’s in charge of the room.

The Experience
The world is not a monoculture, and Clubhouse reflects that. Ideally the experience is more like a town square, where people with different backgrounds, religions, political affiliations, sexual orientations, genders, ethnicities, and ideas about the world come together to share their views, be heard and learn. Some of these communities come together to debate. Some come to relax and joke around. Others hold listening parties and fireside chats. And all these styles should be supported, and Clubhouse is working on tools to help everyone create their own space, deepen friendships, meet new people and have meaningful discussions — in the way that suits them best.

After just a few minutes of using the app, I (literally) can’t stop opening it every few minutes. And every time I open an app, it is just some random but insightful “room” that I end up entering and having a conversation. It has almost completely replaced the time for podcasts in my general routine. With just a week of using it, I have already connected with people who share my interests, people who can mentor me to launch my startup, and even people I can laugh with, on “knock-knock” jokes! Being a social media student, I can see no other app that truly feels like a “social media” app. I can’t name any other app, or even a mobile game, that has got me as hooked!

Thanks to Clubhouse’s FAQ & Blog for making this piece easier to write.