The Clubhouse app has just landed in Spain and is already making waves. It is a social network that invites the gathering. The grace is that only voice is used to communicate, without sharing written messages or photos or videos or emoticons or memes. The operation is similar to that of a call with several parties at the same time. “A direct audio chat”, summarize the promoters of the invention, launched in the US eight months ago now. No prior appointment is necessary to intervene in the debates and conversations, in which celebrities such as Elon Musk, creator of Tesla, also abound. The new social phenomenon promises to make a lot of noise on the Internet, and not precisely because of the audio files.
1. What is Clubhouse? In the words of its creators, the communication platform is a new type of voice-based social network. “When you open the app you can see ‘rooms’ full of people talking, all open for you to drop in or out, exploring various conversations.” More than a community, it is a “network of interconnected and diverse communities”. Only the voice is used and “instead of typing something and pressing ‘send’, it is enough to chat with others, as if it were on the phone. The nuances of communication are achieved with intonation, inflection or emotion at the moment of share the opinions.
2. What is being talked about? Of everything. “Ideally, the experience would be more like a town square, where people from 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 meet to discuss. Others come to relax and joke around. Others hold listening parties and chats by the fire”, explain the founders of the new social phenomenon. The founding objective is to offer a social product in which each user, at the moment of closing the application at the end of the session, “can feel better than when they opened it, either because they have deepened their friendships, have met people new or learned something.
3. How does it work? It’s as easy as joining a group conference. There are ‘followers’ (followers) and ‘following’ (which each one follows). Nothing new under the sun. The number of each of them is displayed next to the profile, along with a brief introduction to each member of the network. The interface is reduced to four icons: a magnifying glass, to explore contacts, people or conversation clubs, with suggestions always at hand; An envelope, with the available invitations and a list of your contact agenda with the number of friends that each one already has in Clubhouse; a bell, with the activity information of the contacts each one follows, along with invitations to join ongoing conversations. In those cases, you can choose between “I’m in” or “not now, thanks”. Finally, the profile icon appears, as in other social networks.
4. Who are the owners? The application belongs to the American factory Alpha Exploration, ‘Made in California?, founded just a year ago by Rohan Seth and Paul Davison, and directed by the latter, a Stanford University graduate who will soon appear on the lists of Forbes millionaires. Among the more than 180 investors of all sizes, the venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz, a resident of Silicon Valley, and specialized in cryptocurrencies and health-related businesses, stands out. The app premiered in the US in March 2020, shortly before much of the country confined itself to their homes due to the pandemic. At that time, there were only two employees (the aforementioned founders), “with their four young children jumping between the keyboards while they designed and programmed the product”.
5. How much is the company worth? Although the application is free, the current valuation of the company is around 1,000 million dollars. Now it exceeds 1.9 million downloads on the iOS platform (as many as users) and adds around 1,900 ratings at the close of the first edition of this analysis
6. Only compatible with iOS. The app is only available for download from the Apple AppStore, for use on iPhones or iPads. It is presumed that it will arrive on Android very soon, although there are no precise dates. The decision aims to control the growth of the social network to avoid ‘dying of success’.
7. Only for guests. Like a good club, it is only accessible by invitation. The benefactor can be anyone who has been touched by the virality of this future cage of crickets. Each of them has two invitations, so it is convenient to thank the user who introduces you effusively. The way to say “come with me” is to select the phone number from the phone book and send the safe-conduct through a short message. Clubhouse doesn’t want to hear about exclusivity. They now act out of sheer survival until they scale the company to the foreseeable demand.
8. How to find a sponsor? The task of getting a friend to give up one of his quoted invitations is left to the ingenuity or convening power of each one. However, you can find out which people you know are already inside and therefore could open the door for you. Clubhouse’s welcome message states it concisely and in four lines in English, which translated into Spanish reads as follows: “Hello, we are still opening, but anyone can join with an invitation from an existing user. Sign up for See if you have any friends in the Clubhouse who can let you in. We can’t wait for you to join!”
9. Is there a waiting list? Yes, for users who do not have the means to sneak into the club or do not have an iOS device, the app encourages pre-registration to receive the access code as soon as possible. Those who sign up for that census can reserve their name so that no one can take it away from them. Therefore, the community managers of the companies should hurry to shield the name of their respective companies and thus avoid future annoyances. ClubHouse believes it’s important “that communities grow slowly, rather than multiplying the user base tenfold overnight. That helps ensure things don’t break and scales the product as it grows.”
10. What data do you snoop? Almost a dozen, although extraordinarily relevant. The first thing it asks for is the contact information (the user ID, such as name, surname and nickname), as well as the telephone number and email, from whose address it is required to confirm the registration. Access to the contact list is also requested and the type of device is identified. Each Clubhouse member can introduce themselves in a few lines as well as link to Twitter or Instagram. The software already takes care of collecting audio usage data as well as hoarding error data for its internal diagnostic tasks.
11. It is not suitable for children. Those responsible for the new creature discourage its use for those under 17 years of age, since it may include audios with sexual content, profanity, vulgar humor or references to the consumption of alcohol, tobacco or other substances, according to the Apple application store.
12. How many users can ‘fit’ in each room? Each chat space can host up to 5,000 users on the same call. As there is no moderator to mute microphones, as several decide to intervene at the same time, it promises to turn the communication platform into a chicken coop. The application menu shows the available chat rooms, along with the icon of the followers of each one. Originally, the idea was to talk about anything but technology. The ‘off topics’ take the lead, although there are sections to talk about art, history, sports, cinema, comics, philosophy, geopolitics, business, cities, health, lifestyle, languages, identity issues, religion… and yes, also technology. Others sing opera, discuss the NBA or do meditation sessions, self-help or give advice on covid.
13. Are conversations stored? It is not clear. Those responsible point out that the path is made by walking while they wonder how they can evaluate possible complaints of abuse, harassment, threats or insults if the user’s conversations are not recorded. They also question how to block or expel from the network users who behave inappropriately against the basic rules of conduct. Being a public platform, the privacy criteria of the communications are applied identical to those of other social networks. When people join a club, they automatically accept the rules.
14. Does anyone moderate the discussions? Yes, there are administrators, moderators or club leaders with the ability to activate blocking tools, muting, notification of possible irregularities and closure of a room during the progress of the debates. The platform strongly condemns and does not condone hate speech, racism, religious intolerance, to the point of expelling users who violate trust and safety procedures.
15. Caution with data consumption. Users who happily use ClubHouse should know that the app consumes relevant traffic. Debates can last for hours, especially the most heated ones. Those in WiFi environments can be neglected, but those on mobile data could wear them out if they weren’t unlimited. As with other messaging and communications applications, telecommunications operators can be sure that the bandwidth that Clubhouse will absorb -both upstream and downstream of the network- will be greater than that of the main social image or video networks. And yes, for now it is free for users.
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