Recently, because of a tweet by Elon Musk, this app also became popular in my circles, mainly Chinese Twitter and the tech world. Of course, this Clubhouse is not the ticketing system used by my company. After being invited by a colleague, I finally got access and started trying it out.
Product form
This app currently uses an invitation system. After a person registers, they can immediately get 2 invitations (though later it seems not everyone got them anymore). It also displays invitation credit, and they even put this into everyone's profile, thereby publicly exposing a binary-tree-like relationship chain across the whole internet, where the root of each tree is some original seed user.
Each Clubhouse user has a unique ID, name, avatar, and can write a profile introduction. They can link Twitter and Instagram, and they can follow others or be followed.
Clubhouse's help documentation is hosted on Notion.
After registering for Clubhouse, users can choose fields they are interested in, and within each field there are individual Clubs that users can choose to follow. It seems the Chinese community hasn't really started seriously exploring this part yet. It seems you have to host several rooms before you can create a Club.
Everyone can host a Room. It can be private, it can allow only people you follow to join, or it can be completely public. In a Room, there can be the owner and moderators. People in the room can raise their hands to speak, and the room owner can decide who is allowed to raise their hand—for example, everyone, followed users, or nobody.
A user's home screen shows Rooms that are currently happening, based on recommendations, follows, or because people they follow are inside. There is also a calendar showing upcoming events.
The notification management for users is fairly complete—for example, being followed, scheduled events, friends from your contacts joining, and so on.
Aside from voice, the product has no other communication methods—there is no text or image support. As a result, users also cannot communicate concurrently inside the app. But when you're in a room, you can still leave and wander around elsewhere.
As for content, everything is real-time and rather casual, so there won't be especially high-quality content (at least for now). For me, I often feel that other people speak too slowly, and without playback speed control it wastes time. At the same time, because there is no concrete text introduction, if you enter midway you won't immediately know the topic and need a long time to bootstrap. The content itself is also not recorded, so it is hard for anything to accumulate. It is more of a discussion tool with social attributes. Perhaps brainstorming is a good scenario for it.
Technically it is still impressive. The audio quality is good, and when switching networks it can reconnect quickly. It uses Agora's technology, and Agora's stock doubled within one day. So Clubhouse the company itself does not actually control the core technology.
What problem did Clubhouse solve that others didn't?
A blank area in the move toward video. I think one thing it solved is this: people say it's the 5G era and everything is going video, but video is not suitable for many scenarios—for example, when we have meetings, we don't turn on video. This voice-only dimensionality reduction captures those who still don't want video. At the same time, when listening, people can keep doing many other things, like walking, cooking, or driving. This product form is a bit like radio programs from many years ago, where you could call in and chat with the host.
A social network for real-time communication. Here we can first compare it with existing online audio and video solutions. They are either point-to-point private meetings and online teaching, or point-to-many livestreaming. The former is private, non-public, and real-time; the latter is mostly public and almost real-time (with current livestreaming technology, there is at least a delay measured in seconds). We might compare Clubhouse with game voice platforms like YY, but there is still some difference between them: the user groups targeted by the two products are different. Products like YY can penetrate well among gamers, but penetration among ordinary social users is much worse. This still comes down to differences in product form. Clubhouse was built for social interaction from the very beginning.
Harder to pollute with information. Compared with text, speaking has a much higher cost because it requires a real person to speak in real time. Compared with video, the participation cost for ordinary people is lower. So if someone wants to use paid posters or bot armies, this kind of place is much harder.
What is special about the Chinese-speaking world?
There is still a threshold for users in mainland China who want to use this: you need iOS and also a non-mainland Apple ID. So the people who got in first were all from the tech world. Precisely because of that, it narrowed the distance between nobodies like me and big shots.
On the first night, I listened to several circles: one was mainly China's investment circles and product managers, and they mostly discussed how this product could operate in China and how it could sink into third- and fourth-tier cities. But inevitably they also talked about feasibility: this product is too hard to regulate, so several product people were not optimistic. They also mentioned monetization, while some investors were still observing and felt that because it was breaking out of its niche too quickly, they could first cultivate the soil and maybe there would be bigger possibilities later. Another room was hosted by Flypig, an internet celebrity who brings traffic wherever he goes. I also listened to the first room selling stuff (voluntarily), sharing what kind of happiness 3000 yuan could buy, and I bought an app called AutoSleep, which turned out to be pretty useful. Flypig said something interesting: with this damned invitation code, plus requiring iOS and an overseas account, huge piles of his followers who were VCs switched from Huawei to iPhone overnight. There was also a Hong Kong product manager circle, where naturally the talk was only about products. Compared with circles inside the mainland, they didn't discuss regulation. It felt like the hottest thing in the Chinese-speaking world was still political rooms. Having lived for more than thirty years, it was the first time I had ever seen a social large-scale discussion of several thousand people that went on until three in the morning.
Because of regulation, people in China have already started making copycats. But products can be copied; this group of people is hard to copy. That's very true, because some people came precisely for the borderless aspect. If the domestic internet made one, I don't think they would come back.
So what is it useful for?
I also don't know what form this product will eventually evolve into. I think in the end content will still be king, and there should still be some users who regularly share content. But it can also be an opportunity for socializing with strangers—for example, casually passing by a coffee shop, chatting for a bit, finding common interests, or simply relieving loneliness. Or perhaps it could be a city forum.