The Secret History of Clubhouse, Part 3 - The Fall of The Tech Bro Enclave

Anti-Semitism on Yom Kippur, cultures clashing and the start of creator drama.

In this installment, we’ll take a trip back to early Clubhouse, shortly after the filibuster Town Hall. This was around the time when the ripple effects of what unfolded at that town hall started to emerge, and many began to flee the platform, especially those from the so-called ‘Grey Tribe’.

Specifically: The anti-semitic Clubhouse room that launched several news stories, silicon valley / tech bros becoming a minority on Clubhouse, how culture rapidly shifted from moderately liberal to ultra-woke, and talking about this fact became forbidden.

Post-Filibuster Clubhouse

Last time, we covered how the invitation of ex-Trump officials led to a platform schism and a Town Hall that turned into a political demonstration. Rewinding the clock a bit, one demographic that I would say was far more active during ‘summer Clubhouse’ was what you might call the Twitterati, ‘Grey Tribe’, or the weird kids of the internet.

The Twitterati had started to become less active at the beginning of fall, but the filibuster Town Hall really marked when Clubhouse became less of a sort of oasis of irreverence from the rest of social media, and when it started to become far more serious in tone and topic. The gradual erosion of ‘assuming best intentions’ had begun, which probably reached a fever pitch when room titles became micro-aggressions in the minds of some (more on this later). If there was one catalyzing event though, it was a room started on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur.

The Anti-Semitic Room

The room was entitled (roughly) ‘Anti-Semitism in the Black Community’, and purported to be a discussion of anti-semitism within Black culture. Some said that the creator had mentioned the room was intended as a troll, which might align with the results of the room, but this room is also the most egregious example of Clubhouse ‘telephone’ throughout its short history so each interpretation should probably be taken with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, starting this room on Yom Kippur whether intentionally or accidentally was not a great choice.

I had not really seen a lot of anti-semitism on the platform prior to this, and I tend to think this room was perhaps the perfect release valve for any of that sentiment that had been brewing. I wasn’t in the room for more than a few minutes, and went mostly by what was relayed by Jewish Clubhouse friends and Twitter. To some on Twitter, the content of the room was just typical woke-left infighting. To others, it was a deeply troubling indicator of how widespread anti-semitism on even a brand new social platform is.

One cannot deny, however, that staging such a room on one of the most sacred times of year for Jewish people packed a serious emotional charge into the event before it ever began.

Many might consider statements like ‘The Black community is enslaved by our enemies, the Jewish community does business with their enemies’ to not be particularly offensive, but the date of this event and the history of anti-semitism made it such that many Jewish users were driven to tears, and off the platform.

The impacts were immediate, if perhaps more subtle than previous events on Clubhouse. Jewish users either fled the platform, ceased to do public rooms, or generally lessened their participation in the community. It also undoubtedly led to a further reduction in the platform Overton window, but perhaps a more justified one than previous events. The reaction that characterized right-wing figures coming on Clubhouse as some kind of existential threat was firmly in histrionic territory, but this room was a prime example of poor moderation making discussions of sensitive topics vulnerable to becoming soapboxes for hate speech.

One of the brighter moments in Clubhouse history is ahead, but first there were also some events that brought the question of entitlement to stages as described in the introduction to this article back to the forefront, and they’re a parallel to what happened with the room started on Yom Kippur.

The Arrival of Speech Codes

Broadly, early Clubhouse was very much a Clubhouse without walls. Private rooms did not materialize until well into Clubhouse’s existence in the fall of 2020, and even then were a ‘hidden’ feature tied to clubs. The lack of walls was what really drew me to the platform, but I think it also created a bit of implicit entitlement to rooms and stages. At this point in Clubhouse history (roughly September and most of October), people would generally let you up to speak on stages, and the ‘party hat’ new member indicator was viewed as a positive thing as far as new members being welcomed even more than long-time users.

The importance of the welcoming / on-boarding culture that thrived on Clubhouse for a time really can’t be understated. New users were welcomed not only to the platform but a lot of conversations, even with some of the world’s elite. Discussions were generally calm, civil, and controversial / sensitive topics could be broached without the usual escalation in hostility that characterizes much of the discourse elsewhere.

One of the most drastic changes to Clubhouse culture has certainly been that the party hat is viewed by many as an indicator of the danger of a potential troll or incoming hate speech rather than as a signal to extend empathy.

One of the other impacts of the anti-semitism room was that unwritten speech codes which generally align with what you might expect on other social media began to materialize. For the most part, probably within reason, but still a milestone on the road to vastly reducing acceptable discourse. One was most certainly that non-Jewish populations redefining the definition of anti-semitism (sometimes along the lines of the redefinition of racism) would not be well received. Another, very similar example is that discussions about race should not be held without BIPOC participation.

One such event occurred which led to a lesser schism, which was admittedly less of a mere discussion of race and probably closer to low-key trolling. I’ll break the no-names rule for this event, mostly because the context won’t make all that much sense without naming Curtis Yarvin as one of the platform’s most polarizing figures. A conversation was had featuring Yarvin and some early users that many felt was firmly in racism / hate speech territory.

To make a long story short, the Black Clubhouse community felt that they should have been included. I think this is broadly an example of the fact that many consider public Clubhouse rooms to be some sort of public platform like a conference stage that requires equal representation as is the practice at many conference events. While events like Marc Andreesen using a slur referring to neurodiverse individuals were more focused on journalists, throughout Clubhouse history, matters such as gender / racial representation have also been critiqued.

The end result of that night’s events was that only one user from the Black community (who happened to be a VICE journalist) was brought up on stage to converse with Yarvin (and others). A room later in the evening went into the fact that it was viewed as a slight that no other Black Clubhouse users were brought up, and the usual discussions about who deserves to be on Clubhouse, whether people should be punished for inviting controversial users, etc. It was also one of the last public appearances of Yarvin, and the ‘late nite lounge’ re-occuring room (usually hosted by some prominent users) gradually drifted away from more controversial chatter and speakers.

The Silly Room

We now enter a period and topic that I was intimately involved in, and was probably the height of my participation in the platform.

Back in early Clubhouse history, there were times when no rooms were active on the platform. To deal with this problem, the concept of a persistent ‘lobby’ was created by users, a room that would always be active and you could go into and hang out. The first incarnation of this was a room entitled ‘The Weird Room’. It was somewhat of a portent that this room eventually was killed from within due to some woke consternation about the word ‘Weird’.

In this room, everyone was made a moderator, and a lot of weird things went on. A den of irreverence, it really captured the spirit of early Clubhouse, which was some kind of experimental Burning Man-esque online space. After the Yom Kippur incident, the platform badly needed this energy again, and the Silly Room was born.

A very weird night ended with a bunch of people copying Marc Andreesen’s profile picture at the time and going into the audience of one of his rooms to try and freak him and the speakers out. Many of them fell asleep, and towards the end of the room you could only see Andreesen clones in the audience. When I briefly wandered in, it seemed like some kind of cult gathering.

On this night, a room entitled ‘Bring The Silly Back’ was formed by some of the platform’s long-time and hyper engaged (at the time) users. The title was intended to bring some of the early Clubhouse energy back at a time when the platform was getting increasingly serious in a very negative way. The idea was to have a lobby of silliness when the rest of Clubhouse was toxic and serious, and it was generally a big success.

The current icon of Clubhouse on the app store, Axel Mansoor, got his start in the Silly Room with his unique form of content which now has its own club, the ‘Lullaby Club’. Axel is perhaps the best success out of this period of Clubhouse, where early creators could experiment and hit on something unique and engaging to the platform at large.

People would come in and share stories of cool experiences they had on Clubhouse, there would occasionally be games and other diversions. A core group of moderators, of which I was a part of, dedicated themselves to always keeping the room open. At one time the platform had a glitch and the room disappeared for some, and a few users, including one of my real life friends was ‘trapped’ inside for a few hours. We likened it to the plight of miners trapped in a cave, but eventually everything went back to normal and the Silly Room survived a major catastrophe.

The room always had a time limit, and went for around 11 days. The room ending day was chosen for someone’s birthday (the original timeframe was a week before it was extended), and there was a ceremony where the moderators moved themselves to the audience until only the birthday person was left, and they ended the room. Before this happened, at the one Town Hall during the silly room’s existence, an important portent of the woke absurdity that was to shortly befall the platform occurred.

At one of the last few town halls where you could directly converse with the founders, someone brought up the silly room with great praise. Almost immediately after, someone else came up to make one of the most transparent efforts at cry-bullying I’ve ever seen in my 2+ decades of being Very Online.

With regards to the source, we are back to no-names, but I will say that watching one of the Fox News liberal contributors and someone who was at one time a candidate to lead the DNC engaging in the kind of online drama that I had witnessed from anonymous users during the era of 90’s internet forums was one of those surreal moments only the early days of Clubhouse could bring.

DARVO Begins

At the Town Hall, this individual claimed that ‘Bring The Silly Back’ as a room name was a micro-aggression against the post-Silicon Valley arrivals. Moreover, that reading the name in the room list on a continual basis was like ‘a dagger stabbing her in the heart’, and that she had received 50 DM’s from people expressing their emotional anguish.

If this seems ridiculous to you, dear reader, it’s only because it is. I recognized it immediately as a textbook DARVO tactic: The reason it was brought up at a Town Hall, directly to the founders, in full view of the platform’s active users was to make the room toxic to associate with. I have seen this exact situation play out in many other circumstances as a way for community dividers to deal with positive events that bring together communities.

If the silly room wasn’t brought up in such glowing terms at that town hall, would this still have happened? It’s a question that would be a good indicator of how badly communities uniting perturbed some individuals on the platform, but one of those things we’ll never know.

A very similar thing occurred in the Information Security community when a cockroach (later named Trevor) was found in a fast food milkshake. Factions in the community came together for a short period over this absurd event, but only until the community dividers found a way to drive everyone back to their corners again.

It was more or less the same story with The Silly Room: Those with political expertise were already exploiting fault lines on Clubhouse, and they just couldn’t have the entire community come together. This individual came into the silly room after the Town Hall and continued to ply their fabrications, and unfortunately try as I might have to tell the other mods what was happening, they entertained the woke absurdity.

Eventually, I put a stop to the discussion in the room, but only after a few other mods had apologized and validated what was brought up in bizarre display. Yes, this is all inconsequential compared to where the platform is now, but it is an event of importance in how ‘old Clubhouse’ was destined to be torn asunder. In its place, endless woke policing which made the very interesting conversations that drew to me the platform impossible to have in public.

After the silly room ended, I tried for a time to continue its spirit, but I think the DARVO engineer described above had set out what they tried to do, which was to kill the community spirit which had emerged. I was actually shocked (which is saying quite a bit) as to how seriously some of the long-time original Clubhouse members took ‘micro-aggressions’, and would engage in endless acrobatics so as to not create a room title that would offend anyone. This was before spurious accusations of racism and white supremacy were thrown about to silence competing creators, but I’m getting ahead of the story.

Community Management : The Easy Way Out

Before the next series of events, we have to talk about how Clubhouse practiced community management at the time. The NYT had been banging the diversity drum since the summer (and to be fair, Clubhouse was very insular to Silicon Valley for a long time). Before Clubhouse made changes in the invite system to skyrocket user growth, their efforts were overwhelmingly positive, bringing many new and interesting voices and content. The way this was done was through biasing invites. Many invites (some have said thousands to particular people) were given to people from these under-represented communities, and the population began to shift. Things were still magical, and I thought that the platform was really going to get things right as far as integrating these communities.

There was no visible ‘community management’, however. Imagine if you threw 2 communities with very little in common, and expected things to work themselves out? Once again, the community engaged in a lot of work the platform should have been doing. It was, unfortunately, not enough to deal with the change in invites the platform was about to make.

Originally, you did not receive Clubhouse invites until you had been on the platform for about a week. Whether intentional or not, this gave time for a new user to acclimate to the culture before deciding who would best fit the environment. It also slowed the influx of bad actors, trolls had to wait at least a week to start multiplying.

Due to this, the welcoming, curious, experimental vibe began to recede. This had already started to some degree, but accelerated as the rate of growth became more than welcoming efforts from the community could handle. Another seminal event was the arrival of Joe Budden, whose rooms were among the largest on Clubhouse at the time. He talked about Clubhouse at length on his podcast, and new elements to the culture arrived on the scene in the form of a group of people who created a room and later a club called ‘Late Nights, Early Mornings’.

This was yet another public lobby format (Clubhouse was still small enough at this point that there were periods of inactivity on the platform). This new format was referred to as the first Clubhouse radio station early on, and was probably would you would expect music industry Clubhouse to create as far as a platform lobby. It was more intentional and coordinated than the Silly Room, with its own Twitter account.

With this, however, the friction between cultures became pretty apparent. In recounting what happened, I will caveat the following words with saying that they are not to be taken as painting this group with a broad brush. From what others said about how the room was run, it became clear it was not a place for me so I never really frequented it. There’s a separate post to be written on the intersection of social anxiety and Clubhouse, but in a nutshell ‘welcoming’ room styles are where I thrive and ‘rough and tumble’ room styles are where I very much do not.

I also heard some anecdotes from others as to their experience in the room, and it seemed like there was an undercurrent of misogyny. With regards to what I mean by ‘rough and tumble’ : Tight control was placed on the room and earlier platform users were not as revered as they were in other rooms. We all accept ‘creator in control’ on Clubhouse, and there was definitely an entitlement from some of the earlier ‘power users’ which was certainly not reciprocated by this new lobby. This is not necessarily a negative thing, just a different way of running a room that some were not comfortable with.

Some members of this group ventured out into other rooms run by original Clubhouse members and were less than polite, and I’d argue in some cases the behaviour amounted to trolling competing creators. It was also at this point that Clubhouse became a lot less nice and welcoming in general, and I’d say the first dedicated trolling campaigns started to hit (but we’ll talk about those more in part 4).

When We Could No Longer Talk About Culture

Where we will end is an event which significantly changed Clubhouse culture, by forbidding the discussion of itself. A room was created with a title alluding to the culture change and whether it was a good or bad thing, which filled up quickly. I was not in that room for very long, except to say that this change to ‘rough and tumble’ culture was not a positive one for neurodiverse individuals. I also heard some statements from others which basically said that Clubhouse was the real world now, and people are rude in the real world.

There was the standard reaction room, which I did not attend, but from reports a discussion of the word ‘culture’ with respect to racism unfolded, which is probably not all that surprising. ‘Culture fit’ and other terms are sometimes used to obfuscate discrimination. I was hopeful that maybe this would just be another event of nuanced discussion showing the power and empathy of Clubhouse, but I was to be proven very, very wrong.

After this event, discussion of Clubhouse culture, and specifically about how the culture was changing was made verboten by the wider community. Opening a room to discuss it would get horrific abuse hurled your way, and this would generally continue to your other linked social media platforms such as Twitter. This was another way, sadly, in that Clubhouse ceased to be something different than any other social network.

What really surprised me, however, was the degree to which this behaviour influenced the early community. A good portion of ‘Silicon Valley’ Clubhouse, which if we’re being honest is to say white Clubhouse, was absolutely terrified of accusations of racism (or later white supremacy), regardless of how spurious. ‘Never apologize to faux-offense’ is something that culture war veterans have learned, but it was clear much of the early community was either unwilling or unable to weather the storm in public.

Eventually, I was informed that one branch of the Clubhouse rumour mill had me referred to as being a white supremacist. I can only assume this was in response to my comments in the culture discussion room and in general keeping to my own circles at this time. In fairness to my secret admirer(s), this is probably more a reference to the wider societal concept of white supremacy than specifically calling me a Nazi, but in this current absurd timeline it’s really hard to tell. I later found out that this defamation was applied to many others as well, to the point of a large group of silly room veterans being referred to as ‘The Silly Racists’.

I hesitate to directly cite something I was told second-hand in a series purporting to be historical in nature, but it’s again a crucial form of context. Allegedly, a core member of the ‘Late Nights, Early Mornings’ group was the one trying to attach these toxic labels to individual people (rather than the cultural artifact of the Silly Room as was attempted earlier).

The impact was something that was quite shocking: Many removed all reference to the silly room from their profiles, a club that had been created for silly members was deleted, the silly room was essentially memory-holed. I really can’t say as to why this latest act of DARVO-engineering was taken so seriously, other than even the most spurious threats from faux-woke imbeciles have the potential for some pretty serious reputational damage.

It was at this point that I knew ‘old Clubhouse’ was over. If I had to do it over, maybe I would have just addressed the issue directly, tried to do a sequel to the silly room, or something else than follow the lead of others shrinking into the shadows. I suppose mainly I had seen this particular story play out enough times over the broader culture war that enough people would be frightened enough as to not want to participate and something like the silly room was not something one person can do on their own.

We are now at the conclusion of yet another chapter in Clubhouse history. At this time, I was very disheartened, but still hopeful the slice of Clubhouse culture I had come to love would survive. It wouldn’t, of course. Hostility overall began to ratchet up, and without any community management or public refuge from platform tensions, a large exodus of original platforms users occurred. Some have returned, but many haven’t. More on the exact details in part four.

On the next all new episode of The Secret History of Clubhouse : We talk about the culture change (in private rooms), things get really anti-semitic and really transphobic, and racial divides on the platform are blamed on racist algorithms.