Clubhouse Might Be the Future of Social Media. It’s Also Very Bizarre.

Heres what Clubhouse, the exclusive audio-only social media app, is like

By Peter Nomeland

On my first day on Clubhouse, I attended a wedding.

We’ll kind of. I wasn’t actually there, but I listened in for  40 seconds in a “room” set up on the audio-only social media platform. The event promoted itself as “Clubhouses first wedding,” and you could listen to the wedding ceremony as it was going. It was both kind of cool and very surreal. Like something out of a Black Mirror episode. Congrats to the happy couple though.

Clubhouse has gained considerable steam in the past couple of months. The app is invite-only (a big shoutout to my editor-in-chief) and has rooms for pretty much anything. Sports, entertainment, yoga, investing, photography, countless topics are being discussed at any time. There are “conferences” and special events with experts discussing many fields and also Elon Musk. It is a strange experience at first, but you get into the swing of things pretty quickly. I got into the NBA and sports discussion rooms and Roast Battle room, where you just roast other people and yourself in a chat room. I loved it. 

Many of the rooms you see at first appear to be in business and social media “audience building,” which may show the types of people getting these invites and have been there the longest. The search feature is lacking a bit, making it hard to find a specific room unless you know what is going on, but there is an ease to the accessibility that I think will help with its growing popularity if it ever stops being invite-only.

The biggest thing Clubhouse has going for it is probably its variety of communities and topics. A big thing I’ve thought most social media platforms have struggled with is that the interface kind of pushes everything to be the same. My favorite social media platform is easy, no questions asked, Twitter, because it acts as both my morning paper and the driving force behind molding my deranged sense of humor. Clubhouse is able to tap into that sort of variation and niches, while also being extremely accessible.

Clubhouse has been one of the fastest-growing apps in the past year, which is likely due to the isolation many of us have felt due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The social aspect of the app also a sense of community that is missing in many online forums and social media platforms. 

Audio-only social media appears to be the future, or at least Silicon Valley thinks they are. On the first day I used the app, I saw that Twitter was introducing a similar platform called Spaces, where Verified accounts can host Clubhouse-like rooms, with the interface appearing to be almost identical to that of Clubhouse. This is hardly surprising and happens all the time in tech. It feels like every time a new trend or popular app rises up, every major social media platform copies or makes its own version. Look at how many versions of Snapchat stories there are. I wouldn’t be shocked if Facebook or Google ends up buying Clubhouse if the interest grows and the idea of talking in audio chat rooms becomes a common thing that we all do. 

When I was in a room debating the recent NBA trade deadline (again, these rooms are very niche), someone who had been in the room for only a brief period of time started laughing and said “ayo this shit is weird”. That got a good laugh out of me as well, but it got me thinking. Yeah, this all does feel weird as a platform and doesn't really sound like it should work. But after a week of interacting with the app and talking to dozens of strangers, I think it does work. And it just might be the future. Or it's going to be the next Google Plus.