The Best Evening On Clubhouse Ever

Two parallel universes colliding didn't destroy the space-time continuum, but it was a lot of fun.

Creating A Microcosm

A long time ago, as Clubhouse was beginning to lose a bit of that lustre it had gained in the pandemic, I created a club called ‘Testflighters’ (referring to the userbase that had populated the community prior to it hitting the public app store). I did this because another club that had purported to be the way ‘early Clubhouse users would reconnect’ had been repurposed and I was a little miffed.

It only captured a fraction of those early users, but as the app started to toxify, this really remarkable thing happened. People starting using it as refuge from the public ‘hallway’, and it became a sort of microcosm of ‘old Clubhouse’.

Communities are great when they’re thriving, the content creates itself and you don’t really have to do much. If you don’t create the structure during these times to handle what happens when things start to slow down, though, it’s likely things may not swing back up to where they were. I wanted more to create a canvas than also create art on top of it, so I mostly let Testflighters evolve organically and it was great to see so many of the ‘old Clubhouse’ norms carry over.

‘The Night’

Testflighters operates in defiance of many current Clubhouse norms, in that it’s a private / invite-only club. It’s functioned very well under this paradigm, but one night we wanted to do a public room basically to do some Clubhouse history and just have fun with people who weren’t in the club.

There had been many rumours of Clubhouse starting to algorithmically derank rooms based on the titles, especially if you put ‘Clubhouse’ in the title. After some frustrated attempts which seemed to not draw an audience, I eventually just made a room title of ‘We Were Here First’. That seemed to work, and we got a bunch of old Clubhouse users to come on stage and talk and generally had a good time.

Stories were told, some in absentia as many original users had stopped using the app at this time. Things were going really well so I put my phone down and got to some work as I listened to others tell stories, and then something really interesting happened.

The Parallel Universe

While I like to think Testflighters left an indeliable mark on Clubhouse culture and history, another club had really started that tradition. Some true ‘summer Clubhouse’ people were part of a club called ‘Magic School Bus’, later shortened to MSB. Some members included the founder of Testflight, the person who actually invented PTR (many articles from people who joined Clubhouse after the Testflight phase have fraudulently claimed they invented it), and a lot of other cool people.

Someone told me to look at the hallway and I saw that MSB had done something inexplicable: Opened a public room. The name sent me into a fit of giggles, their room was named ‘We Were Here In April’. The other day someone present for that night said that it was like two parallel universes had finally collided, and jumping between the Testflighter room and the MSB room was this really surreal experience of bridging Clubhouse social ecosystems.

There’s really not a lot else to tell here, the specifics of the discussions won’t make sense if you weren’t on Clubhouse during the summer or fall of 2020. From a broad sociological perspective though, this specific type of community/club has repeated itself even in subsequent generations of Clubhouse users.

I’ve tried to puzzle out why, and I think it’s really as simple as the impulse for humans to create communities, and perhaps this is why Clubhouse users seem to be operating in defiance of the norms / directions they are being ‘nudged’ in as far as more Content than Community.

There are some good lessons for web3 communities here as well, particularly around not making ‘content’ the substrate on which you try and build your community. Old Clubhouse was not magnetic (generally) because of a certain prescribed series of content, but that the signal was so high you could be assured of quality conversations. If there’s one fatal mistake the founders made, it was assuming that their own creator economy wouldn’t become the race to the bottom that Youtube, Twitch et al have.