There was also backlash: The Information editor-in-chief Jessica Lessin pointed out that these events’ organizers blocked many journalists from attending; the New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz suggested they were excluding female journalists in particular.
Meanwhile, Twitter has been testing a rival feature called Spaces, in hopes that it will soon have a moment of its own. The stage is set for a showdown between two social media companies whose target audiences substantially overlap. But their founding ideas are fundamentally different, in ways that could shape how their respective products evolve.
The Pattern
Open vs. closed social networks
A decade ago, Twitter was hailed by some pundits as a democratizing force for its role in movements like the Arab Spring. That narrative has since been complicated, muddled, and contradicted many times over, and you’re more likely to hear today that Twitter, Facebook, and other social platforms are destroying democracy rather than fomenting it. But there’s another, broader sense in which Twitter has always been at least somewhat democratic. The structure of Twitter’s platform is essentially flat and open, in the sense that pretty much anyone can join, tweet, reply to anyone else, and have at least a remote chance to reach a massive audience.
Having power and high social status in real life — commanding respect, deference, special privilege wherever you go — does not necessarily earn one the same treatment on Twitter. Yes, you’ll probably have more followers than ordinary folk, and you’ll have sycophants who fave your bad jokes or shower you with flattery in pursuit of your good graces. But you’ll also have a target on your back. Any misstatement on your part is likely to be ruthlessly dissected and mocked by people you’ve never met. You can get ratioed or even become the butt of a trending topic on the basis of a bad tweet, and there’s very little you can do to stop it.
None of this is to say that Twitter is truly democratic or egalitarian — nor that it would be entirely a good thing even if it were. Blue checkmarks, follower counts, and various forms of platform manipulation and bias all reinforce power dynamics and inequalities. And some of the same dynamics that make it conducive to activists speaking truth to power, or comedians dunking on a blowhard’s hypocrisy, are also part of what make it a breeding ground for targeted harassment, misinformation, and state-backed influence campaigns, among other ills. On a quotidian level, they simply make Twitter a stressful and divisive place, with lots of rude assholes and posturing and infighting.
I frame Twitter this way as a lens through which to view its contrasts with Clubhouse. Along many of the same axes on which Twitter can be characterized as flat and open, Clubhouse is hierarchical and closed — more oligarchic than democratic. That is almost surely intentional, and indeed a big part of its appeal to some.
Exclusivity has been a theme of Clubhouse from the outset. The app launched in April 2020 in a private beta-test mode, courting tech investors and celebrities as early adopters partly on the promise that they’d be able to talk to each other without the chaos and din of Twitter and other platforms. It’s based around user-generated groups and discussion panels, which happen live and exclusively via voice chat, sometimes in front of an audience. Nearly a year after its launch, Clubhouse is big, fast-growing, and making continual headlines — and yet it’s still private: You have to be invited by an existing member to get in, so just being on it remains something of a status symbol in some circles. It’s also still only available on iOS. (...)
But the exclusivity in this case is by no means an accident; it’s central to the platform’s dynamics. The app is built around “rooms,” which are group chats convened by specific users around a specific topic at specific times. There are also “clubs,” or private groups, whose founders are empowered to set and enforce membership terms. The rooms, in both concept and design, bear a striking resemblance to expert panels at an industry conference. (Too often, they’re all-male panels.) Clubhouse, at this juncture in its development, feels like the answer to the question, “What if SXSW, but an app?”
As with Discord, another fast-growing voice-based platform, this structure is conducive to conversation in a way that the leading social platforms — Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter — aren’t. It guards against what danah boyd calls “context collapse,” in which you think you’re talking to a certain group of people with a shared set of assumptions, but you’re also reaching different people who might interpret your words in a very different way. The medium of live voice interaction also lends itself to the rote social courtesies of normal human interaction, unlike Twitter.
Within each room, there is a hierarchical division of roles. It is run by one or more moderators, who own the “stage” and get to control who can speak, and when. If you’re in the audience, you have to raise your hand and hope they call on you if you want to say anything. They don’t have to call on anyone they don’t want to hear from; if they hear from you and decide they don’t like you, they can mute your microphone or even boot you from the room. There is a hierarchy even within the audience: Those who are followed by one or more moderators appear at the top, the equivalent of a front-row seat, and tend to be more likely to get called on. (It’s also possible to have rooms that function more like a group chat, like Houseparty without the video, but those haven’t been Clubhouse’s main draw so far.)
by Will Oremus, One Zero | Read more:
Image: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images
[ed. See also: Clubhouse Is Suggesting Users Invite Their Drug Dealers and Therapists; and The Case for Twitter Spaces (One Zero); and, Clubhouse, a Tiny Audio Chat App, Breaks Through (NYT).]
