ClubhouseTea #006: Shooting Your Shot In The Wild Clubhouse West
The "quickly reporting troll" function is officially the fastest gun in the West.
Welcome to ClubhouseTea ~ where the tea is steaming and the vibes are intriguing, as always 🍵
Cultural snapshot - we’re in week six and it’s mid-February ~
Clubhouse Town Hall notes will be included in this issue
Over 10M+ users currently registered on Clubhouse, 2M+ DAUs weekly; onboarding China, Brazil, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Turkey the latest !
We’ve delayed our coverage till tonight in order to let the post-Valentine’s Day vibes simmer, but we’re here! Apologies for the delay 💭
Cultural Snapshot - Week Six (Primary Happenings)
Shoot Your Shot Rooms Hit the Target 🎯
It is unmistakenable that this past week was a week about love and forgetting that we live in a pandemilovato. According to Clubhouse’s head of community, Stephanie Saffa Simon, approximately over 2,700+ rooms about love were held this week alone.
This week found itself beholden to one of Clubhouse’s most viral and popular rooms this week titledd “Shoot Your Shot: NYU girls roasting tech guys.” With an audience of over 4.7K+ users, recent grads from NYU tried to help the lonely hearts find love (just in time for Valentines day). Individuals were called up to the stage and picked someone in the audience to ask if they could slide into their DMs. Shortly after their success with the first room, it quickly turned into a recurring series with an expedited club approval for Shotsclub and partnerships with companies like Slice Pizza, who provided pizza to those who participated.
There were a handful of rooms that parodied the initial, including one called “shoot your shot: tech guys roasting NYU girls.” In this room, Gen Z entrepreneurs and startup founders did the matchmaking. Some of the original moderators showed up to the event, but nobody knows what they were thinking.
“Shoot your shot” clubs are not new to Clubhouse and the recent popularity of the “Shoot Your Shot: NYU girls roasting tech guys” room hasn’t been without controversy. Despite the welcomed praise from Silicon Valley and the general tech niche on the roasting of their men, some people felt that the phenomena became an encroaching gentrification of Black Clubhouse culture and in general on people of color. The unprecedented popularity from their room and quick scaling of their club presence (including club approval + partnerships) in less than a month in contrast to some of the POC-generated rooms has drawn ire from users in the Clubhouse community.
That being said, Shotsclub will continue hosting events this upcoming week.
클라밸 (Balance Between Clubhouse & Life)
During the Lunar New Year holiday weekend, many South Korean users on Clubhouse found themselves blowing off steam and dealing in kind, fraternizing with celebrities, professors, and people of different walks of life. People familiar and within reach of South Korean Clubhouse got a chance to behold a rare opportunity to chat directly with Park Young-sun, the Democratic Party mayor of Seoul, and Jo Jung-hoon, a preliminary candidate for the transition to the era.
However, there’s been some controversy in the South Korean diaspora related to the weaponization of exclusivity. As Clubhouse users in South Korea deliberate harder on who receives their Clubhouse invites, the prospect of guaranteeing only those who they can have enjoyable and comfortable conversations often veers into territory that portrays a deeper breach into classism. It plays deep into nuance as the psychological profile of people, heard by audio, is scrutinized further and reinforces a sense of belonging. And to only guarantee those prospects to those who are of your clique or in your immediate circle naturally will exclude people of certain class standings; by lieu of the “empowered communication method”, there are some cultural pitfalls that influence the platform’s usage.
Gumroad: Why Zoom to Clubhouse?
Earlier this week, Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia hosted an AMA and a discussion on why Gumroad was switching internal company communication from Zoom to Clubhouse. He listed the bull case for what would be a productive improvement for his company and included reasons such as the following:
Easier to include our creators in our conversations
Turns Gumroad team members into content creators
Video is largely unnecessary
A general bet that Clubhouse is a big part of the future
Lavingia cited that audio-only provided more immersion for conversation with internal team dynamics. Furthermore, he goes on to acknowledge that the classification of important metrics may be changing in the coming years with the inception of more social audio platforms, citing that active listeners might prove to be a stronger metric than downloads or likes. And in the bull case, a figure of 100M+ users possibly by EOY was thrown around and even stipulating that Clubhouse may possibly surpass Twitter in DAUs.
As to what he felt was needed to improve the overall experience of Clubhouse, he mentioned that two things were needed: the Android app and a larger room cap.
Predators on Clubhouse
During the Valentine’s Weekend festivities, a room called “CLUBHOUSE DRAMA: Who’s tea is being spilled TA-NITE?!” had launched to discuss the controversy of one particular user: Julian Netter. Julian Netter was a personality on Clubhouse that had joined as recently as February 13th, 2021 and had quickly amassed more than 3K+ followers on the platform.
And in context of this room, what started the chaotic investigation into Netter’s past had launched from a personal account from Clubhouse user Cassidy about how Netter was supposed to be her Valentine but then “lost it on her” when she refused to meet him even though the location initially given was sketchy and had changed three times prior. From there, Clubhouse user The Bone Collector had PTR’d1 the mugshot of Julian Netter taken in the state of Florida and Netter had been one of two primary suspects under investigation for human trafficking.
After the revelation of Netter as a suspect for crimes of human trafficking, the conversation quickly shifted onto a topic of how we can protect children from predators and of course what actions we can take to preserve safety. As of recently, he has been banned off the platform. We do ask that Clubhouse users be vigilant in identifying and protecting people from bad actors that intend to take advantage of this platform to harm others.
How did you get my contact?
Following up conversations about Clubhouse’s violations of General Data Protection Regulations in the European Union, Will Oremus wrote a thoughtful piece in OneZero about Clubhouse's unauthorized access to contacts. Discussing the design of buttons and potential consequences, Oremus describes how Clubhouse is violating users privacy and calls it "ethically dicey." Vox wrote a follow-up piece, demonstrating this issue is prominent for both US and European users. Clubhouse needs to respond ASAP before it gets into legal trouble 🥴
Cultural Snapshot - Week Six (Ancillary Happenings)
Clubhouse officially banned in China as of last Monday, February 8th
Elon Musk asks Putin to join him for a Clubhouse conversation; Kremlin is considering the invitation but also asking for more details
NK defector Yeonmi Park did an AMA with Bitcoin advocate and Clubhouse user Ariel Benitez titled “How Technology Can Save Lives - With Yeonmi Park”
The Wholesome Tea, with Bubbles please!
According to Maylyn’s account, the room usually occurs at 8 PM PST daily.
Perhaps the best part of this room is the accuracy of the boba shop vibe. Every person who joins the stage “orders” a boba, has it served to them and chats about their day. Amidst all the chaos of Clubhouse, the Boba Club exemplifies a space to relax, hang out and connect with others in a judgement-free, drama-free way.
AMA-thon (some conversations in the periphery of our feed): Bumble CEO AMA on IPO of Bumble, Shopify CEO interview with Josh Constine (Pressclub), Timbaland x Illmind AMA about the new digital era for beatmakers and producers, #24HoursofLove: Kickoff & Fireside Chat w Senator Tim Kaine
Clubhouse currently is experiencing companies holding internal meetings for their teams, and potentially will see investor and board meetings in the future using the CH infrastructure
Missed the Clubhouse Town Hall yesterday?
Here’s an outline:
On the 2nd Clubhouse Town Hall of February (2.14.21), coincidentally on Valentine’s Day, Paul Davison and Rohan Seth discussed what was up with the platform and what is to come. Let’s dive into it:
Product - this past week
Room link easily accessible
Reporting trolls who recently left the room made easier
New app icon - Axel Mansoor
Hiring people to scale the backend, android app, trust and safety, discovery etc (product designers, product managers, software engineers, etc) - invitation for people in the community to apply
Product features - working on new release this week and have something out mid next week
Club request form down, alternate submission process in the works
Question on the duality of activity: Requested status on activity in clubhouse app outside of sidebar/hiding activity from professional network when accessing casual non-professional rooms
Joining anonymously (incognito mode) - would be bad for the platform and for creators who are moderating rooms
The feedback of one-off use case between professional and personal is an issue that needs more input and thinking before implementation
Room search function requested and event search lacking - involves server work and server is focused on scaling and infrastructure
Breakout into subgroups officially and room regroup functionality a good idea possibly to put into practice
Suggestion on verification code by email instead of phone number verification; to be considered
Paul: “would be cool to translate the content of the room without a real time language translator”
Trust + Safety questions: on moderator badges - can a badge be created that has less moderator powers (ie bringing somebody to the top of the room)?
Security moderator option?
Paul: “stop making everybody a mod!”
Reporting events directly on the calendar is in the works
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!
PTR: pull to refresh; an action in which a user pulls down their screen to update the UI to the most recent profile picture change/display. Clubhouse lingo.