You’re Going To Ruin Clubhouse

You’re going to ruin Clubhouse.

If you haven’t used Clubhouse yet, feel free to skip this post. This is not a “Clubhouse is going to fail” prediction. I actually think it’s awesome for very small group conversations. I’ve fired up rooms on my morning walks and had some delightful, quick encounters with people I used to see at conferences. Weak threads, perhaps — but they all hold us up, don’t they? There are probably some incredible use cases for intra-corporate communications, all-hands meetings, and the like. And it’s a great place to go to hear a specific speaker you are interested in give a one-way talk. It’s fun — it’s a conference call, except you can clearly see who is talking without the ceaseless exhaustion of video. That alone, to me, is cool enough to keep Clubhouse around. I’ve enjoyed these aspects.

But you’re going to ruin it if you use the way I currently often see it being used. I am not going to be trying to get as many people as I can into a Marketing Mastermind room or whatever. I’m sorry, I’m just not. Clubhouse used in that way is little more than a cruel joke, and soon, people are going to get that joke.

Here’s the joke: “social audio.”

A few nights ago, I sat in on a popular room about podcasting, and the moderator recognized me and pulled me on stage (she “voluntold” me, as she put it, a…