Will Clubhouse be the constructive social platform we all long for?
I had a look at Clubhouse and wrote a little Beginners’ Guide with special attention to its potential for journalism. Ultimately, the question is whether the app will finally be the social network for hate-free and constructive debates that we are desperately waiting for.
1) What is Clubhouse?
Clubhouse is an audio-only app where you can listen to conversations as if they were a live podcast (or…er…. radio), and actively participate in discussions. No comments, no likes, no camera on. Entering the platform is still not easy: if you want to join in, you need an invitation — and these are limited. In my case, I just downloaded Clubhouse from the Appstore (Android users miss out, so far) and then someone from my network kindly let me in.
Once you’re in, you can connect with others by simply following them. In terms of content, it is organised according to “rooms” that are dedicated to certain topics. There are public and private rooms and there is no content moderation as fas as I could see. I got into FOMO-mode very quickly since there is heaps of interesting stuff to discover. Actually, to me, the whole thing resembles a permanent un-conference and for me, it will probably be a good way to compensate for not being able to attend terribly missed conferences such as re:publica, SXSW or the International Journalism Festival in Perugia.
2) How does Clubhouse work?
Every user can join public rooms or open one their own. Inside the rooms, there are moderators, speakers and listeners. It’s possible to switch roles during a session. It is also possible to pre-schedule discussion rounds to reach as many users as possible. There are also clubs on specific topics that have a similar function to the groups on Facebook — only on an audio-only basis.
3) How is Clubhouse financed?
Since you can join Clubhouse for free and I haven’t done any in-depth research on their business-model I go with the assumption “If you don’t pay for the product you are the product.” Furthermore, it is assumed that Clubhouse will first build up a broad user-base with hopefully good content and then either place advertisements or introduce paid chat rooms.
4) Potential for journalism?
We’ll have to wait and see. In any case, the languages English, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, French can already be selected along with other areas of interest. As far as I can see, the app appears to be suitable primarily for community-building and deep-dives on certain topics with your audience. For example, what does your community think about current political events? Are there nuances of the topic that your editorial team has not yet considered? You could as well think of organizing constructive Q&A sessions with experts — the possibilities are endless and first movers will certainly gain some attention. In my view, this is an excellent opportunity to find out what really matters to your audience and also create a sense of exclusiveness, transparency and ultimately trust. But beware: There are no moderation guidelines in place yet, so many problems that we are already having on other platforms will appear here as well, if nothing is being done about it from the developer’s side.
5) Many open questions
There are still many, many open questions regarding the future of Clubhouse: Will it be safeguarded by trolls and how can this possibly be done? How will heated discussions be moderated without people starting to shout at each other like on Facebook and Twitter? What will be done to transform it into a more diverse sphere than it is now? Please share your thoughts on these and other Clubhouse-related question in the comments.
Thanks for reading!
