Clubhouse's Epilogue

Inside the rise and fall of the Clubhouse that I knew.

It’s always hard to explain what a place ‘used to be like’. As I said at the outset of my Secret History of Clubhouse series, our individual lenses colour the stories we tell. In the case of something dependent on oral history, it’s a bit like if each person putting puzzle pieces together changes the colour and shape of those pieces. The overall story, much like a river, ebbs, flows, and changes.

The Pre-Clubhouse, Pre-Culture War Internet

To properly end the story of Clubhouse, I need to tell a tiny bit of the story of the (big-I) Internet. I fondly remember my first foray, ironically on America On-Line. It was the mid-90’s, e-mail was still something groundbreaking and AOL was largely a collection of curated content, if not audience, like early Clubhouse was.

I was around 14 at the time, and it was amazing. I explored, privately, my first inklings of being transgender through Dr.Judy Kuriansky’s content. There was plenty of sci-fi content too, and you could talk with the actual writers and showrunners (sound familiar?) There were plenty of fellow netizens to meet and controversies to take part in. One thing that differs from Clubhouse, of course, is that it was a long time prior to when the culture war started in earnest. There were no speech codes, and no self-appointed hall monitors patrolling for possible microaggressions. AOL had ‘Guides’ to enforce their terms of service, who had access to their own secret hideouts. Aside from the content, there were chat rooms.

In these chat rooms. sub-cultures were created, thrived, died, and re-created. I particularly found a home in the AOL ‘Tips and Tricks’ community, which was probably the equivalent of the very early ‘Talk about Clubhouse’ clubs. In reflecting on Clubhouse, I realized that within that sub-culture, we had our own controversies, community leaders, community dividers, and just about an equivalent of everything else I came to experience on Clubhouse.

Internet forums became a thing, and for a time I really loved the Internet. What some might consider the pre-cursors to social media (along with Internet Relay Chat or IRC) were kind of like clubs on Clubhouse. There was one for just about every topic, and each forum often contained multiple sub-cultures. The same rises and falls happened, and it was just fun. It was an amazing way to escape from a less than ideal home situation and that misfit feeling a lot of teenagers who don’t immediately fall into a social circle experience.

The 90’s of Clubhouse

When I joined, Clubhouse really felt like that golden age of forums, something I mentioned during multiple chats with Paul Davison early on. The general social environment of Clubhouse was pretty amazing in that people talked earnestly about sensitive topics, and the culture war seemed to be almost completely absent. Admittedly, I was a little starstruck in having gained access to the internet’s VIP club, but it wasn’t so much talking with celebrities as it was some of the Twitter illuminati that I found most enjoyable. If I had to choose, it would probably be having conversations with many of the people who comprise the Post-Rationalist segment of Twitter, sometimes referred to as Postrats.

One discussion in particular about thornier trans issues, like who should get to define what a woman is, were very fulfilling to have. I’ve always prided myself on being able to discuss things with just about anyone, something that’s equivalent to having a scarlet letter now. I eventually made it into the quasi-inner circle of the ‘Late Nite Lounges’, which were populated with some Twiteratti like Marc Andreesen, Eric Weinstein, and many of the post-rationalist crew. I evangelized the platform at every opportunity, and thought that somehow, the Internet of the 90’s was back. The Clubhouse team, surely, were some kind of geniuses.

Something happened long before I arrived that would have a powerful impact on the 90’s of Clubhouse coming and going very quickly however. Reading between the lines on James Andrews’ piece on Clubhouse, it was clear that many recognized the potential of the platform early on. Trading access to networks for unlimited invites, Andrews and his group ‘The Authenticated’ would have a powerful impact on the social evolution of Clubhouse, and not just because of who was invited to join.

The Culture War Arrives

On my 3rd day on Clubhouse, I happened to notice in the Testflight notes that soon audio recordings would be taken of rooms for Trust and Safety purposes. I was somewhat dismayed, as the Chatham House-rules environment was one of the things I liked most about the platform. I saw what would eventually be coming, and opened my first room : “Will Top-Down Moderation Kill Clubhouse?”

It was a very enjoyable room for me, as talking about social media governance and the impact the culture war has been a favourite pastime since the debacle that’s come to be known as Gamergate. It went on for hours, and I met some people who I still call friends. Later I found out that some portions of Clubhouse, particularly Black Clubhouse were not so much fans as some perceived the room to be complaints about the slowly emerging dominance of their circles and the entertainment industry.

During the room, I had a short discussion with a few people on the impact Black Planet coming to Twitter had, which I thought was very fruitful. I was speaking openly about my past experiences in digital spaces and not with regards to any particular groups so I was a little bit surprised to learn how some had perceived that room. I did perhaps, however, not exactly come at the topic from a place of complete curiosity but also a little bit of judgement, mainly owing to the Taylor Lorenz / Balaji fight that had gone on months prior.

I guess really this just speaks to our current level of polarization, that you can’t have a conversation without it somehow being referenced back to the culture war. I think this is a dying phenomenon thankfully due to Gen-Z eschewing the culture war to a large degree as millennials fight over its embers.

In the face of this slowly encroaching culture war, I went on-stage at every Town Hall that I could, when you still could. I argued vociferously for keeping this cool place weird. I didn’t want to see what happened everywhere else happen to Clubhouse: Opaque Trust and Safety departments and ever expanding speech codes about what could be talked about. I especially didn’t want those that think Freddie DeBoer’s ‘Planet of Cops’ was more of an instruction manual on how to disrupt existing communities and less of a warning.

There were a few of those people already on the platform, and they seemed incensed over a few things: Taylor Lorenz wasn’t invited to every Clubhouse room, Marc Andreesen had the ability to speak in private without a reporter speaking, and other fairly ridiculous complaints. During an irl gathering in the Bay Area for the Testflighters club it was about 10 minutes before I heard someone complain about Marc Andreesen, so perhaps something in the Clubhouse air drives people to levy those kind of complaints, I’m not entirely sure.

The infamous Taylor Lorenz / Balaji fight, and subsequent focus of the NYT on Clubhouse undoubtedly influenced the social evolution of the platform. Now, to be clear: Clubhouse has multiple, large, Trust and Safety problems. Problems that were probably going to happen regardless as the platform grew. I knew a lot of the world doesn’t consider LGBTQ+, especially the T, as deserving of human rights. I did not know how widespread anti-semitism was, but I soon learned.

Accepted Narratives

Thinking back to some other pivotal moments in digital spaces, there is always some accepted narrative that ends up repeated either through the press or when historical events are recounted. Regardless of the actual events that may have transpired, some definitive version of events gets inscribed on widely accepted sources of truth such as Wikipedia.

If there’s one such narrative with regards to Clubhouse, it’s one that’s covered in this CNBC article on the platform. I don’t know that it’s necessarily untrue, but it is reductive in the extreme and also brushes over some of the messier aspects of Clubhouse’s internal culture war.

Yes, TED talk Clubhouse was boring at a point. Beyond boring, it was very much focused on the predominant demographics in Silicon Valley, so much so that when I tried to organize something around emerging toxicity it was dismissed because white males had not encountered harassment, so surely, it wasn’t a problem.

There was plenty that wasn’t boring however, and a lot of conversations that you genuinely could not have elsewhere, where people were authentic and engaged in conversations around very sensitive topics, most of the time with incredible care. This picture of early (pre-October/November) Clubhouse as some boring place for only Silicon Valley insiders is wildly inaccurate and does a disservice to the diversity that was present in rooms like The Silly Room, but has become the accepted narrative.

One other thing that is brushed over in that article is exactly how the conflict started, and how the early and most toxic period unfolded. Rather than white Clubhouse going where they weren’t wanted, as is suggested by the CNBC article, it was really impossible for some to hold a public room at times without hate proliferating. It was also really a no-win scenario, because as Clubhouse segregated due to the toxicity, accusations of the platform or algorithm being racist spread rapidly.

Probably the best example of this was a room I stumbled in once, where a group from Black Clubhouse either changed their avatars to the Silly Room people (this was shortly after Jehmu Greene attempted to cancel us) or some painfully white looking stock photo people. They parroted some of the dialogue that was had in Jehmu’s cancel attempt, and overall it was just a really weird occurrence.

This was also around the time I had to explain to an irl friend who joined mostly due to me raving about the platform around September as to why she came across a room in Black Clubhouse that were changing their avatars to Jewish people from stock photos and attempting to disrupt as many Yom Kippur rooms as possible. Certainly not the worst thing that’s ever happened in a digital space, but still bordering on disturbing.

As I go into a bit later, it was even worse for LGBTQ+ people, particularly those not of colour who attempted to remain visible members of the community. I was asked a while ago why I stopped doing content at a certain point and really struggled with phrasing beyond just Clubhouse’s hate problem.

Basically, what I’m trying to get across here was that it really didn’t matter if you tried to keep to your own spaces, it was made very clear who was no longer welcome on the platform. Several prominent Jewish creators left in protest of the unchecked hate that was proliferating. Later on in Clubhouse’s lifecycle, many LGBTQ+ creators would as well. In both cases, the platform was either unable or unwilling to take meaningful action.

Another one of Freddie De Boer’s pieces on anti-racism is worth mentioning here, as it really was painfully obvious as Clubhouse’s ultra-woke period (probably Nov-Dec 2020) played out. There were plenty of people from Clubhouse engaging in performances worthy of a broadway musical in showing how woke they were. In part, the Silly Room’s reaction to Jehmu Greene in musing on only using emoji’s in room titles was a good example of how futile trying to address ethereal concepts that are vaguely if at all defined. Even in the current era of Clubhouse, innocuous comments had in social rooms are sometimes jokingly referred to as anti-black as a way of subtly pointing out how absurd the discourse has become.

And then there was that time demands were made of me to apologize for retweeting a post-rationalist with a fairly accurate take on what was occurring on Clubhouse. Just as Jehmu Greene has told the silly room, there were scores of upset people in someone’s DM’s who could only be soothed with an apology. I had never really been like or RT-policed before, as I think I make my political stances pretty clear.

It’s really unfortunate because there was a really good opportunity for nuance here (this particular postrat had recently come under fire for asserting that catcalling was something predominantly done by Black men which I didn’t know at the time), and I did receive some more thoughtful DM’s on the matter. The world trends towards context collapse maximalism however, and talking about the culture change and toxicity was verboten long before this exchange occurred.

In a weird way Clubhouse was able to replicate some of the dynamics of social ostracization for problematic opinions via its ‘nuclear’ block feature (when blocked, you cannot see or enter room that someone who has you blocked is speaking in). I later found out that as a result of that retweet I was excluded from a lot of the early Clubhouse crypto / NFT rooms. I don’t think I would have ever bought a Bored Ape at mint price, but you never know.

Largely, the long and the short of Clubhouse’s ultra-woke period was that ‘holding space’ became a meme, and those interesting conversations you couldn’t have anywhere else disappeared. Some went to private rooms, others to Discords, but most of them probably just went away entirely, as no one was really interested in having to defend themselves to investors or employers over a unique digital space for open dialogue that probably always had an expiration date.

Clubhouse Classes

The platform was really something else before you could even create a private room. The anarchist in me loved the elimination of class, and I really can’t express how great it was to be somewhere that bluecheck culture hadn’t yet permeated. The Clubhouse founders often talk about how they want people to feel better after using the platform, and I did. I wrote about it as glowingly as I could, as delicately as I could given that the ‘what happens on Clubhouse stays on Clubhouse’ norm was still pretty strong.

The invite system was probably the most social experiment-y part of the platform. Invites were super hard to come by for a time, and were prized among the Twitterati. I didn’t know at the time that certain investors were given unlimited invites, and thought the system was a really cool way to grow a community. Things eventually went wrong, though, and Clubhouse became less special. It became like the rest of the world, or what Burning Man calls the Default World. This was both good and bad, and your perception of that shift largely depended on who you were. I found it more bad.

Clubhouse has had their favourites from the start, people who had a bit of preferential access to the founders. I’m not sure if I was ever in that group, but I was on the suggested user list for a time. I do know, though, that when anti-semitism came in force, some Jewish users got phone calls from the platform. I did not, however, when Clubhouse became known as that place where dehumanizing trans people is okay.

Clubhouse was like Burning Man in terms of how much of it was focused on experimentation and play. We played the ‘password’ game. We did some soft role playing with collaborative storytelling. Others played ‘never have I ever’, or did Trivia. People did things to see what was possible with music. It was just cool. I’ve come to realize it wasn’t actually just like Burning Man, it was like The First Burning Man.

The Culture War Heats Up

I had written about the looming Trust and Safety issues, and correctly predicted that the culture war would eventually come to Clubhouse. It was probably the Spicer weekend that kicked things off, which led to Jehmu Greene’s short, but impactful reign of terror (among other things). Going from an actual safe space filled with experimentation and play to one where things like labelling a Latinx woman ‘a so-called woman of colour’ was fine, so abruptly, was jarring.

I was talking with a user in my cohort the other day, and we reminisced about an event which is a pretty good microcosm of the culture shift. She had just broken up with her partner, and was understandably upset. At that time, she still felt comfortable sharing her emotions in public. Soon after that, she (a Latinx woman) was labelled as ‘just another white woman crying’ by a few follow-on rooms.

Now, most of this isn’t really Clubhouse’s fault, but is a mirror of events in the default world. Speaking for my own situation, there are multiple fronts upon which trans hate is gaining acceptance. There are the ‘gender critical’, roughly the equivalent of ‘race realists’ along a different axis of the culture war. They enjoy the support of influential people like J.K Rowling, and are dedicated to dismantling the LGBTQ+ community. I have run into them occasionally on Clubhouse, but they aren’t the most concerning group to me.

The most concerning group is those who use woke language to deliver their hate in a way that is taboo to critique. They exist in far greater number on Clubhouse. If not weekly, after any news story involving transgender people there seems to be a room that is created of the ‘just asking questions’ variety which is a thinly veiled vessel for misgendering and ‘debating’ whether ‘trans panic’, up to and including murder is an acceptable response to a trans person not disclosing their assigned sex at birth.

Clubhouse HQ Amplifies Hate

The platform’s priorities are, at the best of times, unclear. When it comes to the LGBTQ+ community however, there is much that can be inferred. Rooms with titles like ‘Are The Straights Okay’ seem to be candidates for suspension. There was one incident in particular, ironically that was the last straw for me as far as trying to use the platform for creation that ironically happened on the anniversary of the Silly Room.

Some who are familiar with my views on freedom of expression might be puzzled by my continuing critiques of Clubhouse here, and in honesty I wouldn’t care all that much for the milder forms of hate if the platform hadn’t hastily put ‘we don’t tolerate transphobia’ after the Spicer weekend into their terms of service. They most certainly do, and this is less about whether it should be okay for non-trans people to discuss when it’s okay to hurt or kill trans people and more about holding the platform accountable. I suspect that few if any trans voices are considered in what is or is not viewed as transphobia.

I ran across a room in which mostly non-trans people were discussing whether trans people should disclose their status before having sex with someone. This, predictably, led to discussion of whether the ‘trans panic’ response, which sometimes end in the murder of trans individuals, was acceptable. I had become so used to it that I was just going to do my regular callout of the platform on Twitter before I noticed something particularly disturbing.

Crystal Mais, a leader in Clubhouse’s partnership organization was in the room and on stage. For those who don’t know how Clubhouse operates, in general the more followers someone has the more prominent a room will be displayed in their ‘hallway’. People who work for Clubhouse have more followers than most do (as of this writing Crystal has ~373k). I was nothing short of horrified that not only was the platform not taking their transphobia problem seriously, but that debating transphobes rather than shutting down rooms was their response.

I took to Twitter, and was a lot nicer than I should have been in not naming which Clubhouse employee was in that room. I accurately described what the employee’s presence did though : Elevate the room to the Clubhouse population. Predictably this drew critique along the culture war axis. I was accosted by one tweeter in particular who was attempting to make the situation about a Black woman being ‘attacked’ rather than drawing attention to Clubhouse HQ’s horrific lack of judgement. I was given some private support by notable Clubhouse influencers who were equally horrified by the platform continuing to tolerate transphobia (and hate against other groups).

I was never under the impression that Clubhouse staff was making anti-trans comments in that room, and it’s really disturbing to me that accurately describing the mechanics of the platform earned me the ire and soft cancellation attempts that it did. Even I, noted observer of the culture war for the past decade or so didn’t think things were this bad.

I think this example also points out something fundamental, that Clubhouse seems to want to be two things that seem to be in a struggle with each other. It does want to be that network of live podcasts or daytime TV, but it also wants to be a social network. Early hires from the entertainment industry probably indicate where most of its effort is going to be pointed, as does product development that at times seemed to be hostile to community. If there’s one common thread to those I have talked to whether they are in favour or against Clubhouse’s current state, it’s that community has generally been thrown under the bus.

On Clubhouse and Clout

On general culture war ridiculousness, I can’t say for certain why a lot of it happened. I don’t know specifically why Jehmu Greene decided to come for the silly room. I don’t know specifically why Farokh Sarmad went out of his way to label Mr. Beast as a racist. I don’t know specifically why Mariana Bah of Late Nights, Early Mornings decided to label anyone remotely associated with the silly room as a white supremacist.

I can make educated guesses though, and most of them have to do with clout. Believe it or not, there was a point on Clubhouse when clout didn’t matter. That early period that was truly a meritocracy of content was really cool. Clubhouse had not yet evolved into a culture warzone or endless radio commercial, so it was still an amazing environment compared to the follower arms race that exists now.

On that topic, during the platform’s meteoric rise there was far less of an issue in getting an audience for your rooms. While some of the Clubhouse ‘whales’ with millions of followers were enlisted to help room visibility, it was rare that you would see Clubhouse staff promoting rooms (which now happens regularly). This has undoubtedly led to the reticence from many to publicly critique the platform (but more on that later).

I ended up having to take a lot of breaks from producing content due to the transphobic atmosphere. At times, I couldn’t even join a public room with friends in the hallway without someone coming up and making horrific comments, most likely due to the fact that my voice is still noticeably male. It’s one of the things that causes me the most dysphoria so when things like that would happen I’d need to take a week or two before being ready to come back.

Even with my sporadic presence on the platform, the last major public room I did drew about 1200 continuous users at its peak. It was based on Taylor Lorenz misquoting Marc Andreesen and his alleged use of the R-word, and was actually one of my favourite rooms due to an exchange between several women on stage and Eric Weinstein during which he took a well-deserved L.

Fast forward to today, where rooms that are boosted by staff members can sometimes struggle to reach 500 users. This isn’t meant to be a flex, but just a statement on how traffic seems to have plummeted. Clubhouse has had the occasional celebrity visit as of late, but those events do not tell the story of what average traffic on the platform is like. Many, in fact, put a large amount of the blame for the decline of Clubhouse on tilting towards external celebrities too early.

That critique is a very accurate one: Who did Youtube and Twitch become known for being the home of? Names like Pewdiepie, Ninja, Shoe-On-Head, Blaire White, Contrapoints, etc. Not celebrities that were established outside of the platform. The really bizarre thing is that there were many early users who would have easily fit into the category of organic celebrity, some of whom have found success in being a ‘Clubhouse Influencer’. Many left, however. Some due to the hate speech, others due to a lack of any meaningful community management.

The winner of Clubhouse’s ‘creator first’ competition from Japan let some of us know one evening that the entire country had pretty much stopped using Clubhouse due to how much hate speech proliferated.

In contrast to the period where I always felt better after using the platform, Clubhouse really frightens me at times. It’s not the platform itself, of course, but its role as a dark mirror of the culture war. It has been proof positive that the absurdly woke have engineered specific incantations to dehumanize trans people, and the dynamics of the culture war itself are such that these must not be challenged lest you be labelled problematic.

Clubhouse Becomes Frightening

Watching all of this unfold is one thing, watching it graduate to people casually speaking about trans murder while intentionally misgendering transwomen, while a senior leader from the Clubhouse team is on stage is something else entirely. I usually tend to think my over-developed skill of ironically being Very Online means I won’t be bothered by such things, but I was for a few days. Things are getting worse, and ‘just report it’ as the end solution to the hate speech problem Clubhouse has means they will continue to get worse. Hate definitely hits harder in audio format.

There were other, marginally less frightening things as well. The filibuster Town Hall wasn’t so much frightening as it was a portent showing the culture war would leave no corner of the Internet untouched. Other events, like watching trans women of colour allowing cis people to berate them over their light skinned privilege was really disturbing.

During the heights of anti-semitism, several Jewish users remarked that ‘we’re doing the white supremacist’s work for them’ as far as the socially condoned hate towards their community that occurred on the platform. Other corners of Clubhouse almost certainly also does the work of transphobes. I really never thought an accusation of racism would be levied at someone opposing trans murder, but here we are. I don’t know if Clubhouse is in fact a mirror of the real world, but I do know some of these events have to be rooted in truth.

The kinds of conflicts on Clubhouse, though, are not really new. I’ve been watching some ancient Law and Order lately, and several episodes are centered around the conflict between the Black and Jewish communities, with several stand-ins for people like Louis Farrakhan (who managed to find his way onto Clubhouse at a point). Not present in those episodes, however, were things like Jewish people being called white supremacists. I hopefully don’t have to explain either the irony or absurdity of that statement.

A Slight Culture War Detour

The room which prompted the controversy known as the Yom Kippur war was entitled ‘Does the Black community have an anti-semitism problem’. An even more salient room would be ‘Does the Black community have a transphobia/homophobia problem’. Based on what I’ve witnessed on Clubhouse, the answer would seem to be: Definitely.

These are the things that you can’t say, however. During the Da Baby controversy I happened upon a Twitter thread by Kat Blaque, a notable trans woman of colour. More than a few replies were filled with rhetoric such as ‘I’m not sure I’m okay with white people calling out homophobia’, which is undoubtedly a sentiment shared on Clubhouse as well. I’ve no doubt it’s a major reason why hate speech directed against the LGBTQ+ community flourishes as it does on the platform.

During a room with some of the Twitterati, a discussion was had on woke culture and it was brought up that its dogmatic treatment leads to a lot of the absurdity. Every so often, I’ll see a tweet questioning any critique using the word ‘woke’ in any pejorative sense, and that everyone should want to be woke. This is, again, not Clubhouse’s problem, but influenced so much that happened on the platform.

With all due respect to Clubhouse users who rapidly defend ‘woke’ from any critique, assuming that there aren’t bad actors who weaponize cultural currents to foment hate is idiotic. This is partially why I think ‘allyship’ is somewhat of a fantasy, given how I’ve seen LGBTQ+ bigotry flourish on Clubhouse. It really seems at times that some who plaster ‘Ally’ all over their social media profiles are little more than useful idiots for the hateful.

Treating it as dogma leads to the context collapse that lets hate thrive. Nuanced conversations about topics such as the privilege of white transwomen are treated equally with thinly veiled hate such as the conversations where transwomen existing is an example of ‘misogynoir’, that transgender people have never been a thing throughout history, and it’s only because of affluent white people in North America that trans folks are gaining acceptance. I have heard all of these things on Clubhouse, without any opposition.

This probably shouldn’t be surprising to anyone though, and I don’t think I’m on any particular moral high ground. I’ve certainly derided white men on many occasions, and the pathway from white men to white women to white transwomen is a fairly straight line. The dogmatic nature of the loudest voices in woke culture equates legitimate critique of the privilege white transwomen possess with violent transphobia, you must accept both. A Jewish user once told me that they are more uncomfortable around some so-called progressive demographics than the alt-right.

This progression also occurs on the racial axis, as you might imagine. I was a little bit shocked, but not really surprised, to see some rooms with titles like ‘asians are just yt people with a tan’ and ‘you can’t be racist to asian people’. This is the next absurd step in the culture war that some have seen coming for a long time, but I think to many it came as a surprise.

I was in a social room once with some prominent early users, with discussion centering around the fact that they were mostly unaware how bad things had gotten with regards to the culture war, proliferation of Asian hate (both irl and on Clubhouse), and how acceptable the right kind of hate is now.

How Did Clubhouse Fall?

I guess I mainly don’t have the words to accurately describe the progression of September to now in anything but a long form piece like this. Maybe, though, that short summary would be something like ‘I didn’t know how bad things were before Clubhouse.’ I, for example, didn’t know how much grey matter culture war brain-worms had chewed through before Clubhouse.

What made it so? Probably one of the old Clubhouse norms, which was ‘assuming best intentions’. Authenticity (the real kind not the Instagram kind) was replete on the platform, and you could assume in general that people were who they said they were, were knowledgeable about what they said they were, and could have the kinds of conversations you can’t have on Twitter.

The Balaji / Taylor Lorenz conflict had changed things a bit for the Clubhouse ingroup of the time though. Early old Clubhouse had taken to private rooms as soon as clubs were implemented, mostly due to how publicized the conflicts on the platform had become. As I’ve mentioned before, some users made it their personal mission to invite as many journalists as possible which probably had the same effect of the special firewood at the end of Back To The Future III as far as accelerating the platform’s catching up to current year.

You can’t have the kind of interesting, candid conversations with reporters hovering waiting for their next big gossip story. I was initially drawn to Clubhouse because of the conversations you couldn’t have elsewhere, that dynamic didn’t last long. The more that things pivoted to media and ‘content’, the less special the app became. You could find most of the same kinds of content elsewhere.

Old Clubhouse also was more like unformed clay than it is now. You didn’t know what the future would hold, that eventually conversation would give way to performance (no one could have predicted something like the Lion King would happen). Nuclear-level blocking was not a certainty. If you predicted Kevin Hart would appear to defend his comedy, you probably would have been given the side-eye.

I’d prefer to talk about the culture war as it relates to Clubhouse as little as possible, but it’s undeniable that it was the key ingredient in so many pivotal moments. A lot of what happened on Clubhouse can be microcosm’d into one part of current culture war rhetoric : Can you be racist to white people? The answer, in most circles (and certainly the ones that are dominant on Clubhouse) is no. In terms of discussion of things like systems of oppression, this probably isn’t something that’s all that controversial. When it came to just attempting to describe the kind of hate that was put forth on Clubhouse though, I was really bewildered by the rhetoric that sprung up.

I was perplexed, to say the least, when a platform that seemed to be steeped in ‘ally’ culture sometimes responded to the anti-semitism and transphobia not with condemnation but with categorization. I don’t think it really mattered whether you put the word ‘racism’ or ‘racial prejudice’ as one of the roots of the hate that sprung forth, but many on the platform did.

When that hate began to descend on the platform, a few members remarked on things like ‘Wow this really reminds me how some communities really don’t like white people’. Someone from overseas, after having been repeatedly targeted for harassment based on being in the white woman demographic, said that she didn’t at all realize how bad race relations were in the US. She eventually had to change her profile picture to a flag of her home country or pretty much anything except for her face to avoid having some pretty horrific things said to her when entering most rooms at the time.

I hopefully don’t have to go into every culture war bullet point here, and I’ll instead say that if it was a topic of people yelling at each other on Twitter, you can probably find it on Clubhouse. Whether it was rooms like ‘Should we teach society that trans women are women’, or ‘Asians are really just yt people’, Clubhouse’s idyllic setting of being insulated from everything going on today didn’t last all that long.

Some Bright Spots

All of this being said, Clubhouse has had some really bright spots for me. Probably the last one was when I did a combination ‘Clubhouse birthday’ and actual birthday room since I hadn’t had the chance earlier in the year. Paul Davison showed up to sing me happy birthday, as did a few older users I hadn’t seen in a very long time.

It was a vital part of my transition, and I think without it I would not have the confidence that I now do to exist in public as a queer transwoman. There were so many surreal, hilarious moments in the early days. I made so many new friends I would never have run into otherwise, and a good amount of those relationships have persisted.

Even when the toxicity became bad, I found a few spots where I could still hang out in public rooms. I created the Testflighters club to try and recapture old Clubhouse, which worked for a long time, albeit on a limited scale. I’m sometimes regretful I didn’t put more community management work in, or set up my own Discord for it as was suggested months before that platform became a popular way of capturing Clubhouse audiences. I’m always aware, though, that my motivations at the time were non-extractive community building.

I said that ‘Clubhouse isn’t social media, it’s social’ in my first Clubhouse room, and I think that I was ultimately both right, and wrong. The once in a lifetime event of Clubhouse was, for a time, extremely social. The platform itself however, for me, no longer is.

What was old Clubhouse? What is it now?

It’s hard to accurately characterize how Clubhouse was and how it is now, but if old Clubhouse was some kind of cool content, current Clubhouse feels like the comment section at times. The hallway felt automatically curated, whereas now it sometimes seems to be a cacophony of people arguing in the comments. Social grifters continue to spin conspiracy theories, and whom blocks whom continues to occupy a disproportionate amount of bandwidth.

Within the culture of Burning Man, there’s a concept known as default world. That is, the world that exists outside of Black Rock City. Within BRC, is that experimental new world that comes together and is ultimately consumed in fire over the course of a week. Early Clubhouse more closely resembled the playa in that it was new ground. People experimented with games, platform features, and so on. New norms were created, and no dependence on the outside, default world was implied.

That only lasted for so long, of course. The point at which Clubhouse lost its lustre for me was when people began to excuse the cultural shift and negative outcomes as ‘Well, that’s how the real world is.’ That statement is just a matter-of-fact for some groups, and a fateful reminder of the lack of equity for others. What began with ‘people are rude in the real world, so deal with it here’ has evolved into some very dark and disturbing phenomena.

I can only personally speak for my own experiences of course. In parts of the world, trans people being seen as human is entirely optional, and that reality definitely exists in corners of Clubhouse. What began as a trickle when talking about the change in culture became forbidden has now evolved to a flood that is probably not fixable. The only thing that would possible mitigate it is algorithmically analyzing conversations, and good luck trying to accurately characterize conversations.

On the positive side, however, Clubhouse has been an invaluable window into other cultures and communities. I was involved with a diversity movement in psychedelics for about half a year in 2020/2021, and Clubhouse was considered as a platform. Due to the toxicity of the platform, it was quickly decided that if anything, it would be a funnel to other media.

One member of our group did remark, however, that it was a remarkable insight into the Black perspective, particularly the ‘on-the-ground’ perspective in America. It has definitely served that purpose for me as well and the platform should really be lauded for fostering that kind of understanding.

In short, when transphobia and homophobia came to Clubhouse, I was really surprised that the reaction of many of the BIPOC LGBTQ+ population was to flee rather than tell the hateful to get lost. I’ve since come to understand that for many in that community, racial identity trumps gender identity and makes that decision more complex than it would be for someone like me.

In an early Law and Order episode, Executive Assistant District Attorney Ben Stone has a poignant conversation with his assistant DA, Paul Robinette. In the aftermath of a racially charged case, DA Stone says that Paul will have to make a decision about what he is : A Black lawyer, or a lawyer who’s Black. It seems like this is also a choice amongst those in the LGBTQ+ community, and the vast majority choose the former.

Black men are also often the subject of many a Clubhouse conversation, by Black women, Black LGBTQ+ people, and others. Needless to say, I really wasn’t aware of a lot of the cultural nuances that Clubhouse has made more accessible, and I think the platform is to again be commended in facilitating that kind of understanding in the current polarized climate.

As I said in the Secret History series, white women soon became a target on the platform. This is not where I make some impassioned plea to protect the delicate sensibilities of your local neighbourhood Karen, but it is where I’m going to outline the eventual culture war progression that many seem to want to ignore. If it’s okay to say ‘lol white men amirite’, it’s okay to say ‘lol white women amirite’, and this will (and has in some ways already has) progress to ‘lol white transwomen amirite’.

In terms of a greater discussion on the impacts of racism, systems of oppression, and other things this makes sense. It is, however, also a great backdoor for hate that many on Clubhouse have and continue to exploit. In the interpretation of Woke which treats all of its ideas as dogma, there is no nuance. The argument that accurately discusses privilege must be treated exactly the same as the argument that white transwomen have some arbitrarily high level of privilege that makes murdering them for a certain transgression okay. Both are immutable truths, and only the Problematic would dare to contradict either of them.

Another seminal moment came when Taylor Lorenz had posted an article talking about Clubhouse’s newly created ‘Creator Pilot Program’, an article in which she also drew attention to the anti-semitism and other forms of hate on the platform. She was on stage in a room talking about the article, when something pretty significant happened.

Two Black creators in the program accused her (as others have) of being overly biased against Clubhouse and that due to that she couldn’t objectively report on the platform. She retorted, saying that line of reasoning was often used to silent dissent by women and people of colour. What came next is probably not surprising to those who have followed culture war currents, in that she was told to not invoke the struggles of people of colour as a white woman.

Another sign of racial discord on Clubhouse has been the change of icon for the Clubhouse application. It began with a photo of Bill Murray, and since then has rotated through pictures of Clubhouse users. A pivotal point was that after a Black woman was featured as the icon, it switched to a picture of a white female Clubhouse user who had contributed a lot to the community and had a fairly popular re-occurring room.

I was in a Clubhouse Telegram group at the time, and someone posted a collage at the kind of hate the new icon received. It was pretty horrific but again not really surprising to those who were on the platform for any extended period of time. Another controversial icon change was that a Black woman was considered who had mad fairly anti-semitic comments in the past, and when that choice was rescinded there was a riot on Clubhouse with the usual rhetoric of silencing the Black community. In that regard, it seems like Clubhouse HQ is in a perpetual no-win scenario with bad faith actors on the platform.

Every time I have the mind to try and re-engage with the platform on a public basis, it usually happens that makes it exceptionally clear Clubhouse is not only no longer a place where I feel welcome, but a place where things like condoning violence against LGBTQ+ people can be a topic for casual discussion. It’s easy to come away with the impression, given how culture war punditry usually unfold on Twitter, that things were not this bad. The people who warned about things such as the above were just some alt-right grifters trying to earn subscriptions for their newsletters, views for their videos, or new members for their Patreons. Sadly I can say from personal experience that this is definitely not the case.

Having seen evidence to the contrary first-hand, I again don’t really have much more to say on the topic except that I had no idea it was this bad, and I’m really frightened. I’m frightened by how much grey matter culture war brainworms have fed themselves with. I’m frightened by the fact that not only does no one say anything when horrifically casual trans hatred is bandied about on Clubhouse, but that the first instinct of a senior leader from Clubhouse was to go on stage in a highly transphobic room. I’m frightened by how easy it was for a few vocal sociopaths to instill such a sense of fear that speaking up against this kind of hate is now regarded as something that’s too risky to do.

A Priceless Time Machine

The culture war might have eventually set the Clubhouse that I knew ablaze, but what I experienced before that happened was so special, so magical, that it’s almost worth it. There was a window of opportunity during the platform’s meteoric rise, mainly due to the kind of hate that I wasn’t prepared to deal with at the time. If I had to do it again, maybe I would have tried a bit more or did the same thing many others did, ‘took a break’ during the period of peak toxicity. Unfortunately though, I don’t think it’s really possible to ‘take a break’ from LGBTQ+ hate on Clubhouse, but just try and avoid it.

Still, after Clubhouse became transactional, it wasn’t the same. Hundreds of thousands, or even millions of followers are worth far less then my experiences on pre-default world Clubhouse. This probably seems like a silly thing to say when millions of followers bring brand deals and money just for being in a room, but to quote Lorde, I crave a different kind of buzz. There is no price you can put on the trip back in time to the 90’s / 00’s that Clubhouse gave me.

I entered into a discussion with a long-time friend the other day around the default world concept, and she brought up an interesting point about making something globally inclusive should work for everyone when I alluded to some of the more negative aspects of Clubhouse being subsumed by the default world. The problem really is that often communities assume the way to deal with bad actors is rules, and norms, and it isn’t. Bad actors will ignore the rules, redefine them, appeal to emotion, shame community leaders for enforcing them in the wrong way, and so on.

Pre-default world Clubhouse didn’t often have a need to do this, I think, which is pretty remarkable. In a way, the invite system was the platform’s downfall when it came to enforcing exclusion. For example, the ‘Fuck Jews’ guy was back on the platform after being suspended in about 3 days due to someone of the opinion that it wasn’t actually anti-semitism, but just ‘white people complaining’ so he should really be given another shot. It’s somewhat surreal that the invite mechanic both offered a vector for shaming and also a mechanism of subverting the platform enforcing its rules.

There’s another reference to time travel, in terms of the mismatch between the Clubhouse app being ‘beta’ and the social graph being an evolving entity since March of 2020. As such, some behaviours during the ‘Wild West’ period became so ingrained that by the time the app itself became ‘production’, it would be difficult if not impossible to remove them without completely resetting things like follower counts.

On ‘creators’, very allegedly Clubhouse has asked some creators to not ‘duplicate’ rooms as of very recently. This runs in contrast to the ‘don’t cry about someone taking your idea and executing it better’ vibe that has been prevalent ever since what we’ll call the Town Hall Recap Snipe.

I had been doing Town Hall recaps with one of my clubs for a month or so, basically opening a room after town halls for the community to discuss. They went pretty well and were a cool way to do some community building. I hadn’t been scheduling them and decided to start doing so.

Over the weekend I was given some vague warnings to schedule it soon because someone else was going to but didn’t really grasp what that meant. So, I scheduled it the day before. On the day of, I was somewhat surprised to have very reduced room attendance and didn’t find out until I got a few Twitter DM’s from people.

Abraxas Higgins, current Clubhouse icon had scheduled a room with the same name for 5 minutes before my time, ensuring it would show up first in the Clubhouse calendar of events. It was also scheduled with ‘Community Club’, a club which had a far greater reach than my own. This is probably the best example and place to discuss plagirizing content on Clubhouse since it still get discussed and has been central to many events on the platform.

To me, this was basically the definite end of the ‘one super-community’ period, for better or for worse. Most of those who I talked to were of the same opinion that this kind of split would eventually happen, but it was really early for it to be happening and was probably more an example of swiping the mic using the dynamics of how Clubhouse operated. Being honest, however, it’s kind of a pretty big act of hypocrisy on my part to talk about community in one breath and then become upset about typical content machinations.

It was kind of my limit though. From being labelled a white supremacist (for reasons possibly having everything to do with content wars and nothing to do with ideology), to the trans hate that was festering, to now having someone with a bigger club reach lifting room ideas, I decided that my efforts were best spent elsewhere. I’m not sure if I believe the report that Clubhouse has asked people not to do rooms in favour of smaller creators, but the inconsistency as to when lifting an idea for content is good or bad is just a little bit disingenuous to me.

Hate and Creators

Clubhouse, though, wasn’t strictly anyone’s community to build. It was likely always going to be A16Z’s media company, and many believe that the growth of that original, amazing, special culture was entirely an accident. I tend to agree, so it was something that was really never preservable. In other words, something worth documenting but not lamenting over the death of for too long. It was, though, the best example of a truly inclusive community that has since been replaced by something different, and for some, far worse.

The real issue is that Clubhouse knows they have a hate problem. When I say Clubhouse, I both mean Clubhouse the company and Clubhouse the community. The company has predictable responses, which probably aren’t worth belabouring too much here. The community response, on the other hand, has really been surprising to me in mostly bad ways.

When I make the occasional tweet about the general experience of trans people on Clubhouse, I will sometimes get DM’s asking if it’s coming from a certain section of Clubhouse. I will respond in confirming it’s coming from Black Clubhouse, and get something back like ‘oh yeah, that’s what I thought’. The ‘certain section of Clubhouse’ portion is literal, and I think it says something about the culture war in current year that both people aren’t comfortable asking such a question in a reply, or even being direct about it when asking in a private forum.

I understand why the entity I regard as ‘The Community’ doesn’t say anything. Would you want to invite any sociopath who has mastered woke incantations that allow them to peddle hatred, consequence free, onto your internet doorstep? Probably not. I am disappointed, of course, but such is life. I am somewhat thankful that I have some empirical confirmation that ‘Allyship’ is largely a fictional concept and you’re far more certain to bet on ingroup / outgroup dynamics.

My biggest community ire is probably directed at those who the company might listen to, but stay silent so as to not jeopardize their standing as Clubhouse’s favoured creators. Some of whom have been targeted in the same way I have. In the end though, I also understand this situation, and it’s because we have different interpretations of Clubhouse. For me, Clubhouse was a place like the playa. For them, it’s probably also a place too, but more of a resource to cultivate.

Value Extraction

In that sense, when social audio was viewed as the Next Big Thing that would create audio millionaires in the same way Youtube had, it seemed like there were a rush of extractive people who wanted to mine the resource of Clubhouse. Some were influencers, others were VC’s.

Is there anything ‘wrong’ with this? Probably not, but it’s the most direct cause of the current hollow nature of much of the content on the platform. Community is not building a personal brand and collecting followers, but many think that it is. When much of the reason for the social proof of follower count was being around (and free from systemic hate) during Clubhouse’s meteoric rise, it’s hard to not view much of the ‘social audio strategy’ content as inherently superficial and having questionable accuracy.

I guess I can’t really be upset at the individuals, if they were to say something it’d probably be ignored or given a dismissive response. I do want my friends to succeed in whatever they’re seeking to achieve, and some familiar with the entertainment industry have told me that this is just how things operate. Which is maybe another way of saying enlightened self-interest is just the human condition.

What I am upset by is probably the systems that enforce this binary choice, which I guess is probably saying I’m upset by capitalism, consumerism, and a few other -isms. Clubhouse was never going to solve these problems, or probably ever be able to escape these problems, it’s just kind of depressing to see these changes happen in real-time. A while back a well known creator told me that they wish they had never experienced ‘old Clubhouse’ because the gulf between that environment and what it has become made them quite sad.

Web2 Fails Hard

Balaji and some other culture war commentators have sometimes commented on building parallel institutions as a new strategy rather than attempting to regain control of existing ones, if you believe that they have fallen to ideologues. For a very short time, Clubhouse was a parallel institution. As its social capital increased, it became prized ground in terms of who would hold sway, what the eventual norms would be and acceptable topics for discussion.

Many found it far easier to build their own private audio-enabled communities rather than to try and deal with an increasingly hostile platform, and that’s possibly the best example of Clubhouse as an ultimate failure of one vision of web2. The big playground lasted for a little while but eventually exclusion of some groups became normalized. This is also the story of Twitter, and perhaps humans are just not meant for web2. Preston Byrne penned a particularly insightful blog post about the matter, with the following passage that I think is really true:

Our constitutional system was not designed to accommodate millions of belligerents constantly screaming at each other at the speed of light, as social media does now. Hoping to completely silence our philosophical opponents’ viewpoints is a fool’s errand; apart from being morally wrong and illegal, it is technically impossible, as the ability to spin up a server is the ability to host an online forum. Perhaps it is no bad thing if we embark on experiments to structure the Internet in such a way that unlike-minded people are kept further apart.

One of the peaks, however, of Clubhouse for me was a room which had a stage full of interesting guests, but no pairing so unlikely as vocal San Francisco government critic Mike Solana and San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. This was perhaps one of the last great examples of Clubhouse as a place for conversation about what were hot topics on Twitter.

Multiple interpretations of how this room unfolded exist, but most in my circles view it as a SF DA finally being held to account and quickly retreating from conflict. In the wake of this room there was a barrage of critique from left-leaning Twitterati over how the room didn’t properly represent SF demographics, essentially: ‘How dare someone create a Clubhouse room without doing a population poll and making sure everyone was represented?’

Clubhouse: No Longer A Social Club

Clubhouse was sticky when unlikely conversations happened on the spot on a regular basis. Social justice enthusiasts have had many detrimental impacts on the platform, but probably none worse than this kind of gatekeeping. Eventually whatever value you might get from running an interesting spontaneous room was outweighed by having to deal with faux-woke internet sociopaths showing up on your doorstep with pitchforks.

At a point, Clubhouse became passively ‘discouraging’ of private rooms or rooms used as social clubs. It’s widely suspected they were not favoured by the algorithm (a theory I share), and changes to the follower systems also disincentivized private clubs. None of this is particularly surprising, of course, as Clubhouse locked it’s trajectory to that of a media company some time ago.

I was once in a room where someone from the ‘Entertainment’ side of Clubhouse HQ made some comments about private rooms. One statement was about that if you wanted ‘influence’ you should be doing public rooms (this absolutely lines up with Clubhouse’s product decisions). The other was something like ‘Let’s see if your content is popular when the app is opened to the public.’

This in addition to a few other occurrences on the platform lead me to believe that some creators are more equal than others. During the boom period, having rooms promoted by ‘Whales’ was not as important. One of my last public rooms discussing Taylor Lorenz misquoting Marc Andreesen reached 1.2k, some of it was due to Eric Weinstein gracing us with his presence but the room was up to around 700 without him.

Now, room visibility is heavily dependent on Clubhouse whales, a good number of which work for Clubhouse HQ. For a while now, people who have said some or most of what I’m saying here in private are exceptionally reluctant to say it in public. With mention in a recent article that some Clubhouse users were afraid to be named because they felt the platform would retaliate, I really have to believe part of this reluctance is losing favour with Clubhouse and perhaps no longer having their rooms boosted.

The Current State Of the Clubhouse Culture War

The best way to concisely talk about the current state of the Clubhouse culture war is probably a recent room:

Is this transphobic? A valid topic for discussion? The answer is probably not as important as who is deciding, and I suspect trans people are unlikely to be in that group. This room was not pretty, as you might imagine, and this time it trended without any help from Clubhouse staff. It was at least eventually shadowbanned, and this statement should be taken as a good indicator for how low the bar is on Clubhouse as far as enforcement.

Clubhouse’s Content Problem

It is very puzzling as to why Clubhouse allowed a lot of interesting content to wither on the vine. Marlena Rodriguez hosted a Friday night room entitled ‘Fuck It Friday’ every Friday since Summer of 2020 up to a point a few months ago where one Friday a month was taken off, until a few weeks ago in which she ended it completely. I had an idea one night for ‘Clubhouse Prom’ which we pulled off spectacularly, and yet more attention seemed to be paid to other parts of the platform. Rodriguez was recently quoted in a business insider article about issues with Clubhouse’s ‘Creator First’ program and issues of declining active users.

I entitled this piece ‘Clubhouse’s Epilogue’, not just for clickbait reasons but because the platform has changed to such a degree since I joined that it’s not really Clubhouse to me anymore. Some long-time creators have made statements like Clubhouse now has a bunch of features but has lost all of its soul. Another has said that the platform turned from being some kind of magic to a network of lame live podcasts. I think maybe these are a little harsh, and perhaps a better description is another one that I’ve heard, in that Clubhouse is now daytime TV.

Whichever description is most accurate though, most of Clubhouse is really boring now. It’s clouty, filled with conversations about Clubhouse itself that have already been had about a million times before, and find myself going back to Youtube and elsewhere for interesting content. I’m certain this is not the case for the rest of the world, obviously, but the stickiness which was definitely there in the fall of 2020 no longer exists.

All this being said, Clubhouse as it has been executed over the past year should largely be lauded. While the Clubhouse that was has become a Gatsby-esque green light that I’ll never be able to touch again, I am certainly in that group of people who have had their life changed by the platform.

Next week, largely due to culture war commentary in some early Clubhouse rooms I’ll be attending Hereticon, which is poised to offer much of pre-Culture War Clubhouse IRL. Perhaps Clubhouse was successful as a social experiment, if only to show what was possible given the right conditions.

Why I Still Use Clubhouse

The residual attachment I had to Clubhouse was due to how important a part of my transition it had been versus anything really tangible at that time. While I stayed around to the effect of creating the ‘Testflighters’ club, as well as doing a newsletter recap to keep fellow pre-public users informed about what happened at Town Halls and such, I was pretty much done with using the platform in the manner that it was rapidly being pushed towards.

I am probably mostly a bit salty towards Clubhouse not only due to the above but because during the meteoric rise while many were building followings, the trans hate became so bad that I would rarely go a week without hearing something directed towards me personally. Often this happened just if I was just hanging with some friends in a public room. Clubhouse has really yet to take any responsibility besides boilerplate statements to tech reporters on what they allegedly don’t tolerate, but I guess the same can really be said of any social platform.

I was making a joke about consumer social and Buffy The Vampire Slayer on social when a Twitter colleague of mine made an interesting observation, that perhaps consumer social really represents a vampiric ecosystem, where each new buzzy app just siphons the userbase of the previous one and growth is a bit of an illusion. I think there’s some serious truth to that line of reasoning. So it’s just possible that I’m just in-between platforms to be sucked to right now, which is why I still hang around Clubhouse.

Creator Entitlement

There’s been a lot of talk about creator entitlement, and in my view it is at times quite self-serving. For much of late 2020, there was seemingly endless dialogue about how much Clubhouse owed marginalized creators. To some degree this is very true, productions like the Lion King and Hamilton led by Black creators were some of the best content on Clubhouse and not promoted nearly enough. The big However, is that now much of the dialogue revolves around creators who are not successful just not being entertaining enough.

Fuck you, got mine is certainly nothing new, I saw a lot of it during the 2014 Twitch / Youtube era. Many successful creators have often posted some variation (or verbatim, in some cases) of ‘Don’t cry if people steal your content’.

Compared to early Clubhouse, behind the scenes creator dialogue is so incredibly toxic. There is much discussion of who stole whose content, people jockeying for favour with Clubhouse HQ, and so on. It really reinforces my view that the early rush to monetization and pivot to ‘creators’ was one of Clubhouse’s biggest mistakes and probably due to a lack of solid direction in the face of the dominance of the entertainment industry.

I don’t think this is wholly specific to Clubhouse, as a wave of articles in 2021 centered around what the internet in general owes to Black creators. This is all heavily audience specific, of course. In other words, weird internet people such as myself are probably not Clubhouse’s biggest demographic or who they want the platform to be most aligned to. It’s just a really hard conversation to have with the extreme rhetoric that can’t be eliminated for fears of being cancelled.

There has been a consistent stream of this rhetoric on Clubhouse (I have heard all of these verbatim): Black creators have saved Clubhouse from irrelevance, the only good content on the platform was originated by Black creators, all content white people have created has been stolen in some way from Black Clubhouse, etc. Probably the most extreme is calling Clubhouse an exercise in colonization.

Is there an element of truth to all of them, in some cases perhaps many elements of truth? Probably. A famous occurence of content appropriation is over the ‘Shoot your shot’ style rooms, how it was originated by Late Nights, Early Mornings and only became promoted by Clubhouse once the NYU girls started doing it. Another piece is how TED talk Clubhouse turned up their noses at shoot your shot and other styles of content originated by Black Clubhouse.

There are many nuances, however it’s definitely true that TED talk Clubhouse was exceptionally prudish and was upset when people started using profanity in room titles. I was actually quite glad to see the platform get away from the perma-LinkedIn crowd, and I think unfortunately it was more timing than any particular cultural bias that resulted in what happened with the NYU Girls.

What Is An Epilogue?

It’s not that there’s nothing of value on Clubhouse, or it doesn’t have a certain market appeal of purpose. Instead, it’s that it’s fallen very far from what it was. Many creators talk about how radically their room size has dwindled and now are focused on at least duplicating content elsewhere, if not outright moving to platforms such as Twitter spaces or various ‘Metaverse’ venues.

The arrival of ‘The Millionaires’ is probably the best example of the greed and value extraction that started to happen, as that’s really when Clubhouse started to decline for many. With no community management or curation, the magical authenticity gave way to an increasingly transactional place. I don’t think that the ‘place’ that Clubhouse was ever really recovered. Eventually, it became a place all about promotion, personal brands, and monetization. There’s really no better description than calling much of Clubhouse an endless radio commercial.

I end writing about Clubhouse with conflicted feelings. Clubhouse should be lauded because I think on the totality of its existence, there was something for everyone. There was probably magic for others long after it had vanished for me. The social experiment that was pre-content Clubhouse was so fascinating (and it’s a shame I’m probably the only one to coherently write about it).

I told Clubhouse HQ that the excuses of ‘we’re in beta’ were dodges, because the ‘production’ social graph started building as soon as the app was launched in March of 2020. The behaviours that were incubated, many of them during periods with little to no community management are those that persist today. It’s no wonder that the kinds of voices the default world prizes are dominant, or that those who need extra help to thrive are gone. I’ve come to understand some of the most precious, beautiful people only emerge when the social set of conditions are arranged in a certain way.

Those voices were among the most interesting, and were driven off early, either by open hate or being drowned out by others. I’m happy to still be friends with many of them, and I think Clubhouse gave many of us the confidence to make our voices heard even in the unrelenting onslaught of those who are especially talented at yelling the loudest. In the process, I think it also exposed many to the absurdity of the culture war in full and just how fractured our social fabric has become under the guise of social justice.

I guess I would describe Clubhouse now as often being what Gen-Z Sonar users described it as when it began to toxify, ‘The place where the weird old people go to yell at each other’. This is maybe now known as the ‘drama rooms’, and the decline in users is partially attributable to the fact that Springer-esque content isn’t all that interesting over the long term.

The End

In Babylon 5, Londo tells Garibaldi that ‘It’s good to have friends, is it not? Even if only for a little while.’ One of the things that impacted me most about old Clubhouse was that people I became friends with were people I would have normally shunned due to their views or our positioning on the culture war spectrum of beliefs. That is so exceptionally powerful that it’s really sad it has been lost in the endless warzone that Clubhouse became. In the end, it was good to have friends, if only for a little while. And it was really good to have a place like old Clubhouse, if only for a little while.