When Clubhouse debuted at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, it fulfilled a yearning to connect with others while cooped up at home. The live audio concept that served as the foundation for the app quickly exploded in popularity. Dupes emerged on platforms ranging from Twitter toReddit, but less than four years later, Clubhouse itself has mostly become an afterthought. Now, the creators behind the app are revamping and relaunching it as a voice messaging-focused platform.
Clubhousehas been redesigned with group messaging in mind, but it’s still rooted in audio. Through a new feature called Chats, you may send voice messages to friends across the platform and receive replies in the form of audio. You can choose to listen to messages at a faster speed or skip them altogether. Clubhouse also lets you save voice messages you want to hold onto and replay later. Live audio isn’t going away — Clubhouse said in its announcement that live rooms will still be central to the platform experience. However, the new focus of “depth over reach” was made clear.
It seems that speed is the name of the game this time around for Clubhouse. To differentiate itself from the group texts you already have going, Clubhouse is trying to emphasize how much quicker it is to speak than type. It even goes as far as to highlight some of the basic benefits of talking rather than writing out what you want to say.
For instance, Clubhouse noted how the tone of a person’s voice can help you forge a deeper connection. However, longtime existing users might find the platform’s changes to be a bit much. The ability to create text posts in Houses — private communities in the app — is going to be replaced with voice chat. Text DMs are also going away, although your old ones will be stored in an archive. Instead, Clubhouse is allowing users to send voice messages instead, and you may see who your friends have been exchanging messages with on their profile.
These moves are being painted as ways to foster more intimacy between friends, but they are an inverse of Clubhouse’s original, more traditional social media strategy. Clubhouse debuted an exclusive invite-only platform, and it took a full year before its doors opened to everyone. Notably,Android users had to waitjust as long to be able to download it onto their devices. Although the revamp may be welcomed by some, it could be too late, given the over-saturated social app landscape. This is in addition to the fact that group texts already elicit a groan out of many of us — is it really less irksome to hear a messenger’s actual voice instead?
