ClubhouseTea #002.5: Clubhouse Town Hall (1/17)

Town Hall rehash of what was discussed last week + few new updates in the Q+A.

Missed the Clubhouse Town Hall today?

Here’s an outline of what happened:

During the Clubhouse Town Hall today (1.17.21), Paul Davison and Rohan Seth mentioned what was shipped in the past few days and again emphasized that DISCOVERY is the baseline for this upcoming update within this week. Pretty short Clubhouse Town Hall updated today!

Note: There are a few additional iterative product features that they are adding, but beyond that the town hall focused more on the Q&A and provided a rehash from what happened last week. We will be adding the town hall agenda from last week for clarification.

• Hiding rooms from feed will be possible

• Hand queue option for only people in your club

• Social handles for clubs (brand-oriented) to be implemented possibly

• Android version will be coming soon

• Founder Paul Davison advised not to give too many mod badges to dilute the user experience in any given room

• no ability on CH to have recurring conversations yet; club programming with recurring time (event series) was advisable via club description

• Creator analytics (peak concurrent viewers in room, retention rate (1min to 5min), attendance, participation, engagement); will bake that into the product

• Possible inclusion of DMs specific to Clubhouse (natively in-app); a product consideration for the future, but want to be thoughtful about how they roll it out (not too distant future)

• On weaponizing blocks: “with live group audio social, it’s hard to make a critical decision when the thoughts of one person conflicts with another”

• Proactive blocking to prevent people from your contacts from adding you upon joining? Yes, it’s a good idea and will be adding as an iterative product feature according to Clubhouse team.

Clubhouse Town Hall Notes (1/10)

What was shipped in the past few days including:

• Topic suggestions (the basic function that recommends conversations and clubs)

• Ongoing product development + improvement

• Topic directory (150 topics that you can browse, everything from pregnancy to AI to French, etc.)

  • Listing your topical interests in settings does not reflect a public change to feed/recommendations currently

• Smarter prompts (i.e. music mode, server load notifications)

• No follow 4 follow rooms and no blue checkmarks on public profile AVI

  • No actual verification solution currently offered on Clubhouse

Coming soon (this week/next week) from this upcoming Tuesday is of the following:

• further infrastructure support

• Audio issue fix (alleviates problem where your mic is turned on the moment you are invited on stage, will now arrive on stage with mic muted)

• Support tooling

• Server error notification fix

• Customer service made easier and accessible natively in-app

• Stressed emphasis on one strike policy on Clubhouse for trolls, violations made on Clubhouse ToS

• Pin messages on feed separate from notifications (follow, etc)

• Allowable change of phone number for user account

• Additional amendments on feed filtering, follow suggestions; showing people of interest based on topic, proximity of following, how active on Clubhouse, last active on Clubhouse, engagement on platform via rooms started

• Improvement on people suggestions, club suggestions

• Analytics for clubs (possibly) to include info gauged of the following:

  • % of members that engaging in club-hosted rooms

  • attendance of people based on time duration (i.e. stayed in room for more than two minutes)

  • member user retention, etc.

• Random room recommender? Possibly will allow people to randomly dive into a room based on topic (reminded me of the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button)

• Request for hiding certain rooms from feed by keyword/manual override

• Better detection of activity bad for the network (spam/etc)

Product features that we found interesting (that they’re thinking about implementing in the distant future):

• Whisper function: productize speaking to another speaker on stage or audience member without talking directly into the main speaker feed

• Instant universal translator: possible product feature to have conversations with people on Clubhouse that do not speak your primary language; easier accessibility to the global Clubhouse audience base

  • product development of translating audio speech also insinuates some insight that transcription is to be a priority in the product timeline as well