Let’s talk about the app everyone is talking about
With Clubhouse, a new social media platform is emerging. Starting for iOS only and using an invite strategy to onboard new users makes the app not only exclusive but sells it as something mysterious and desirable.
As a pop-in audio platform, people can join conversations in different rooms that everyone who is on the platform can create. Moderators can promote listeners from the audience to join the panel and to participate in the debates.
On the platform itself, it is said, the ‘political and societal elite’ is discussing content, trash and the potential futures of the platform itself. Regarding the latter, we have questions:
1) What happens to political and societal discourse if it happens in a space that is only accessible through iOS. Yet the question is not only when clubhouse is planning to open their platform for Android users. While it’s audio based content is somewhat innovative, they did not bother to grant accessibility for deaf and hearing-impaired users.
2) Is clubhouse going to ensure that mistakes that have been made in the past will not been made again? How would they do this? As such platforms all have to deal with hate speech, discriminatory content and alike. Who will decide about which users to ban and which content to allow?
3) Will clubhouse eventually just mirror the audience of other platforms? It can be observed within the first days of its usage, that the rooms with people that have many followers on other platforms also get the bigger audiences. Will there be emancipatory potential for not-well-known-people to get a piece of the cake of attention and audience?
4) Will Clubhouse take into account the addictive potential and its structure that is giving a big push to FOMO. The fear of missing out is not only a reason to sign up to the platform in the first place, as it is a topic widely discussed on twitter for example. As multiple talks happen at the same time, it is hard to decide whom to listen to. Clubhouse is different to all the other platforms in its transience, and in that regard alone worth a closer look for digital sociology. Is it that fear of missing out on something, that is keeping people awake until late in the night?
5) Will there be improved moderation tools? What we see right now is that there is a huge number of male-dominated panels. We can also observe that there is no “raise hand” feature, that we got so used to on Zoom over the last couple of months. Once there are more than four panelists, it often gets messy who speaks. Will the platform develop indicators that tell about ratios of women speaking? Would they take the opportunities to support diversity through technical features? So far, it does not look like that inclusion is their biggest goal, as they are not very accessible.
6) Once the platforms grows, it is inevitable that the platform will use sorting and recommendation algorithms to provide users with the panels that are most relevant for them. How will recommenders be implemented and what will the criteria be that they are optimized for?
7) How will they deal with privacy and data protection? Currently, new users are asked to upload their full contact book, it seems unrealistic that the users have their contacts’ consent that their data is uploaded to the platform. Also, it is unclear how the usage of the platform will be tracked and analyzed in order to receive suggestions for panels in the future.
8) Finally, as we have learned from other platforms a very crucial aspect will be how the business model of the company running the app will look like. Are they aiming for a sellout to another platform or do they want to create a sustainable corporation? Will the app be funded through a fee or through advertisement? And how will these business models affect how the platform works? Depending on the business model, the app will be optimized differently, leading to different concrete implementations that will affect different users differently and that will decide about the platforms impacts.
With Clubhouse growing in an informed and rather elite audience, these questions are superficially already discussed on the platform itself. From an STS perspective, this provides special opportunities for observing the genesis of a social media platform.
The next weeks and months will tell: On the one hand, Clubhouse is just another app, just another platform and just another social media. On the other hand, it will show whether platform operators have understood the critique and debate from the previous years and whether it is possible to in fact maintain responsible implementations of platforms. Future will tell. So far, the start of clubhouse appears to be of a particular taste. It gives us reason to repeat all those questions and concerns that have been stacked up over the last years. Will it outstand as an innovation or remain another example of all too well-known issues?
