ClubhouseTea #004: Being Switzerland In A House Divided
Verzuz, but for pissed off entrepreneurs who love to tell you to follow the moderators.
We had to keep the kettle brewing a tad bit longer because of Elon Musk! It’s now ready and steaming hot 🍵
Cultural snapshot - if you’re reading this, you survived the month of January!
Clubhouse Town Hall patch notes included in this issue
Elon Musk’s arrival on the app felt with anticipation as people treat it like a headliner’s music festival appearance, more than 30K+ people in attendance
Clubhouse hits #1 on the Japanese App Store 🇯🇵
“Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.”
- Henry Adams
It is no surprise that being Switzerland in the realm of social audio is difficult. To remain neutral in a erratic quagmire, it requires that we just accept chaos as is and that is a hard fact for us to confront given that social media, by design, was exemplified to augment polarizing viewpoints.
In the developing fabric of a social media framework, trust and safety hasn’t always been a first priority in the roadmap. And as this platform slowly approaches its one year anniversary into the iOS App Store, its explosive growth marks a parallel familiar to platforms that we’ve seen become social media juggernauts like Facebook and Twitter. The only glaring difference is that Clubhouse is a notable breakout in the menagerie of audio startups and on the cusp of something nascent in the field of social audio. It will be commonplace to own an account in the social audio space, just as much as it is owning personal real estate in social media.
More celebrities, industry professionals, and industry executives flock onto the platform to learn new insights and grow closer to an audience that they may spectate upon with wonder and speak their personally aligned gospel into existence once on stage. The great equalizer for access has allowed people of status to be a part of the everyday conversation, seeing Boston Celtics co-owner Steve Pagliuca join in on the “NBA Watch Party - Lakers v Celtics on ABC” room or several moderators hosting an AMA for CEO of Time’s Up and Former Chief of Staff for Michelle Obama, Tina Tchen.
Cultural Snapshot - Week Four (Primary Happenings)
Clubhouse Meets the Land of the Rising Sun
Earlier this week, Clubhouse users noticed a large amount of Japanese-speaking rooms on the platform. This comes after CH onboarded its first Japanese users onto the platform and theconversation that followed was positively wholesome yet somehow chaotic as people were freaking out about meeting Bomani X, who they immediately perceived to be a similar counterpart to that of Tom Anderson of Myspace. Even Reuters reported earlier today that the app is “booming” in Japan, moving up the charts in the App Store.
Clubhouse is continually growing its global userbase. As a result, individuals will have the opportunity to interact with users around the world. From language learning rooms to insights about industries abroad and even the all-too-familiar theme of growth hacking Clubhouse followings and Follow 4 Follow trains, it is clear CH is appealing to a more cosmopolitan populace.
Japan is the first Asian country en masse to be onboarded on the app and it marks another milestone, to which Clubhouse continues its expansion.
Wall Street v. r/wallstreetbets, Elon Musk Shakes Up Clubhouse, and Proclaimed “Meme Master” Elon Musk REAMING RobinHood CEO
Vlad Tenev
Just as r/wallstreetbets trended on Reddit and Discord, Clubhouse users turned the hallway into a audible deluge of stock tickers yelled out with $AMC, $GME, $NOK, and other meme stocks and altcoins this week including Dogecoin, too. Any room featuring GME, AMC, or WallStreetBets in the title commanded an instant hundred plus audience in each room and most consistently surpassed 1,000+ users in each room throughout the week. From (not) giving investment advice to discussing the press coverage, individuals had the opportunity to serve as a hub for financial conversations and others chose to shitpost about reckless gambling in this ubiquitous casino.
A notable moment for Clubhouse that arose was when the WallStreetBets Discord and Reddit were removed for hate speech. Users opened dozens of rooms on the app to discuss WTF happened and how they saw the situation playing out. However, the question of insider trading is one that constantly CH will need to address at some point in the app’s history. With off-the-record conversations, it is easy for illegal tips to go unnoticed. And as such, Clubhouse must, once again, continue deliberating the role of moderation and how it can prevent users from falling into trouble with the feds.
To add fuel to the fire, Clubhouse reached another eclipse in user engagement and growth when Elon Musk announced on Twitter that he was planning to speak on Clubhouse with Sriram Krishnan as part of Good Time. Many things were discussed that night everything from space exploration, colonization on Mars, governance in a planetary system outside of Earth, Neuralink, California, memes as communication, parenting, Tesla, digitization of medicine, vaccines, and much more. The conversational interview was plotted very safe conversational-wise, given that Elon Musk has sprung himself into trouble answering very candidly in interviews.
However, the peak chaos of that night came when Vlad Tenev, CEO of Robinhood, was invited by the panel to speak on Clubhouse (where the hell is his crisis PR team telling him not to download Clubhouse?). During the course of the interview, the energy of the room completely changed as it switched from Elon Musk being interviewed to Elon taking up the mantle of active interviewer vis-à-vis with Tenev. He then goaded Tenev into telling the details of what exactly happened when Robinhood paused trading of certain securities of the market. A lot of the tension was attributed to increased margin needed due to unprecedented volume/load on the system as well as pressure from NSCC (National Securities Clearing Corporation) because of market factors like volatility.
The questions were very pointed from Elon’s end and indicated that he had premeditated a lot of the inherent question flow he were to ask if he was confronted with Tenev, echoing much of the sentiment seen in r/wallstreetbets the past week. There was implication that something shady went down and that if “ANYONE [IS] HOLDING YOU HOSTAGE RIGHT NOW, BLINK TWICE” which elicited some stifled laughter from the speakers. Overall, pretty crazy.
The Clubhouse Gang Celebrates Holocaust Remembrance Day
On January 27, 2021, in observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Clubhouse users Adam Swig, founder of culture non-profit Value Culture, and Jewish rapper Kosha Dillz brought in Sami Steigmann onto Clubhouse to be the first Holocaust survivor to speak to the masses of several thousand users prior to his speech at the UN. He discussed educating the next generation about the Holocaust and advised people not to be the bystander. Stressing the importance of encouraing people to be outstanders to be proactive about education of the world, Steigmann would leave a mark on much of the users and meriting a notion that his imparted words might have been the most impactful to have graced the platform thus far.
The (REAL) Cookout v. The (FAKE) Cookout
Provoked by the recent promotion of The Cookout on the hip-hop media morning show, The Breakfast Club, the real Cookout app came out publicly that Friday morning to reveal the full story of how the culprits of this imposter venture (Bobby Gay, Brylan Markal) had infringed and diluted the trademark of their app. On Meez-O Estates’ room “When It Comes to the Cookout, I know it’s 2 Sides I Smell Cap”, they hosted the legitimate Cookout founder Kiki Bryant who went onto explicit detail of the extent they had gone to impersonate the Black-owned social media network.
5M+ REGISTERED USERS ARE NOW ON CLUBHOUSE, AS OF JAN 31ST!
Cultural Snapshot - Week Four (Ancillary Happenings)
This week, avid and casual music enthusiasts alike gave memorializing eulogy to the left-field pop pioneering producer, SOPHIE, and Double K of LA-based rap duo People Under the Stairs. People in the beatscene community and those familiar with underground hip-hop would mourn the passing of Double K whilst people in the LGBTQ+ community and those familiar with underground pop music mourned the loss of SOPHIE.
Technology industry analyst Jeremiah Owyang gave his latest report on the future of audio startups, roadmap, business model forecasts in the emerging world of social audio; we recommend checking out his report if you’re interested in this ever-growing market of interactive social
Contrarian figures like Ali Alexander, leader of the “Stop the Steal” movement, and Michael Cernovich recently joined Clubhouse. Invitations of problematic people continue to draw ire from members of the general Clubhouse community and a response room to their presence on Clubhouse transitioned into a conversation about censorship of speech on platforms and what extent of violation outside of a given platform warrants a ban
CH PROGRAMMING SPOTLIGHT:
In regards to personal endeavors on Clubhouse, I try to host panels on a music culture club I run on the platform called Acrylic Room. We book our events a month or two in advance to make things happen and I’m very happy to announce that we’ll be doing an event every Tuesday afternoon for the month of February.
Missed the Clubhouse Town Hall last Sunday?
Here’s an outline:
During the Clubhouse Town Hall today (1.31.21), Paul Davison and Rohan Seth discussed what’s up with Clubhouse and Stephanie Saffa Simon becomes a regular on these town hall formatted meetings by giving a cultural recap prior to shipped updates and the subsequent Q&A. Let’s dive into it:
Town Hall (1.24.2021)
Due to explosive international growth, the dramatic knee-jerk reaction in user growth has affected peak user time as it moves from 6PM PST to the morning.
What is up on Clubhouse?
CH team is internally working on performance side and community side including hirings at Clubhouse this week
More fixes on trolling problem (emphasis on zero-tolerance policy on trolling!)
Testing new audio fidelity including increase in bit rate
Adding external links for rooms (BIG NEWS!!!)
Fixing deep linking (external link of CH event to clubhouse in-app journey fix)
Building out specific one-off events and onboarding new communities (rolling out slowly)
Black History month spotlight on Clubhouse coming soon
Q&A Insights:
Live and asynchronous rift is something that is to be addressed but is notably difficult
Maybe a recap from Clubhouse team in the future
Question addressed about possible translation of Town Hall; answer was uncertain towards specific product feature that would be proposed as solution
On Events/Calendar: it would be great to have an event calendar for clubs specifically and a event calendar for one-off events
Building out Discovery team at Clubhouse to help optimize discovery (feed filtering, recommendations, etc) thru ML
Language filtering
Spirit of following = you think their content is interesting
Rating hosts when you leave a room? Not sure.
Reporting from the audience will be made easier in subsequent updates including reporting from outside the room
False reports against speakers = offense punishable by suspension or ban; preventing weaponized use of block feature is of concern for Clubhouse staff
That should be all. Tune in every Sunday for more coverage!
I’m on this bird app, Twitter, so tweet at me: @choi_clint. You can also find me on clubhouse: @clint. Lauren Huttner, our ClubhouseTea co-head, can be found on Twitter @Lauren_Huttner ~
Please share this with your friends. The hot goss is worth sharing with friends, so let them know that yes, Clubhouse is our beat. If there’s anything you think should be covered as a Clubhouse trendy/cultural topic for a given week, feel free to let me know!