What is Clubhouse?
Clubhouse is the latest social media app that has been the talk of the town since its launch in March 2020. It was created by Alpha Exploration Co and endorsed by celebrities such as Oprah, Elon Musk, Drake, Ashton Kutcher, and many more. It is considered the next biggest app after it was evaluated at $100 million.
The app is user-friendly. While Instagram focuses on video and images, Twitter on text and words, and Facebook on faces and profiles, Clubhouse focuses on audio.
Objectives of Clubhouse
Clubhouse is an audio-only app for sharing helpful conversations among celebrities, industry experts, and friends. Once you join the app, you can listen in on other people’s conversations, contribute to discussions or start conversations altogether. This exclusive and elusive nature of the app is what is making it controversial.
Clubhouse has become a place for celebrities, adventure capitalists, media personalities, and other famous figures to share experiences and advice. Moreso, It is a secure platform where they can lecture, answer questions, and even share information deemed too personal for audience sizes on other social media platforms.
Similar to a Zoom call, the host moderates the members inside a room. Members can raise hands if they want to contribute, and the host unmutes them. The maximum number of people per room is 5,000. The app is excellent for networking as an invite links you to the industry’s biggest names.
Why is Clubhouse not open to the general public?
Clubhouse is not open to the general public because it is centered on exclusivity and some sort of secrecy. Members share information with only a particular group of people that they choose.
How do you join Clubhouse?
Joining Clubhouse is easier said than done. There are not many members in Clubhouse, and this exclusiveness has made the app a success. Currently, the approximate number is slightly over 100,000. The app is in ‘beta,’ meaning that it is open to a small number of individuals. You can only join Clubhouse if you get an invite, and only members can invite. Every new member is only given one invite.
Once you get invited, you can download the app and get started. However, it is only available on iOS, and you need an iPhone to access it.
You can also join through an exclusive side-door. When you visit Clubhouse’s site, they give you a prompt to download the app from App Store to reserve your username. Subject to the number of friends in Clubhouse, they might be notified that you have downloaded the app and secured a username. They have an option to let you in even without sending the official invitation. The process does not use up any existing invitations.
Unless you have an extensive network or big on other social media networks, getting that long-awaited invite could take time. Therefore, you need to act if you want to be a member because the app seems to have a great future, and you want to secure membership early.
Is Clubhouse safe?
Clubhouse developers consider it safe, but there have been some security concerns, especially from China. According to the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), Agora Inc, a Shanghai-based firm that creates real-time engagement software, provides back-end infrastructure to Clubhouse.
The SIO established that Clubhouse ID numbers and chatroom IDs are conveyed in plaintext, which would probably give Agora Inc access to raw Clubhouse audio. Therefore, anybody watching internet traffic could match up the IDs (not usernames) on shared chatrooms to identify the people talking to each other.
The SIO further found metadata from one Clubhouse App room being transmitted to servers in the People’s Republic of China. The audio was being relayed to servers under the management of Chinese entities around the world. Given that Agora is a Chinese firm, it would be required by the law to help the Chinese government find and store audio messages if authorities established that the messages were a national security threat.
Agora said that it does not store audio or metadata and only monitors network quality and bills its customers in their defense. As long as the user data is stored on the US servers, China would not have access to it.
Clubhouse issued a statement to SIO stating that upon launching the app, developers made it unavailable in China. However, some users create a workaround to download the app. That meant that the conversations they participated in could be transmitted to China unless China blocked the app.
Clubhouse told SIO that it was working on rolling out additional blocks and encryption to stop Clubhouse users from relaying pings to Chinese servers.
Community Guidelines of Clubhouse
The community guidelines are essential and help you to understand the following.
- The values that make Clubhouse an out of the ordinary place
- The primary responsibilities that Clubhouse users have
- The rules that you should observe as a Clubhouse member
- The actions to take when you encounter inappropriate behavior
Principles Of Clubhouse
Clubhouse was created to be a space for sharing authentic conversations and expressions. The following are a few important guiding principles.
- Be yourself: The authentic nature or Clubhouse starts with the people
- Show respect: That applies to every person at all times
- Be inclusive: Accept, welcome, and take into account the diversity of people and perspectives.
- Build compassion and understanding: Participate in debates that are meant for good.
- Nurture genuine and important connections: This is Clubhouse’s main agenda.
Roles On Clubhouse
Clubhouse’s conversations take place in rooms that have a moderator, speaker, and listener. The following are the roles of each.
Moderator
When you create a room, you are the moderator, and you can add or remove other speakers. You direct the conversation in the room. The best moderators thoughtfully choose the speakers, manage conversations and keep in mind the audience experience.
Speaker
Speakers have the ability to talk in a Clubhouse room. Ideally, the person that created the room is a speaker together to the first person that joins them. The rest are listeners and must be invited if they want to speak. Successful speakers share the stage, understand when to mute or unmute and know when to leave a conversation.
Listener
When you join an ongoing conversation, you enter the room on mute, meaning you are a listener. As a listener, do not be pressured to speak, raise your hand if you want to contribute, know new people, side chat with your friends, browse other rooms and join or leave spaces at your pleasure.
Clubhouse Rules
When you are a member of Clubhouse, you must always follow the following rules.
- Use your real name and identity
- You must be 18 years or older
- Do not engage in bullying, abuse, or harassment of a person or group of people
- No distribution or threaten to distribute or incentivize the distribution of other individual’s private information without permission.
- You may not record, transcribe or reproduce or share information from Clubhouse without permission
- You may not show prejudice, participate in hateful conduct or threaten harm or violence against any individual or group of people.
- No participation in any conversations or upload content that violates any proprietary or intellectual property rights.
- Circulation of false information or artificially magnify or suppress information is not allowed.
- There is no promotion or sharing of information that is meant to cause harm to a person or group of people.
- Do not use the service to conduct illegal or unauthorized activities.
Clubhouse Safety
Clubhouse safety entails:
Content moderation
Moderation is mainly done by room moderators. You can also decide who to interact with.
Incident reporting
If you feel like a rule has been violated, you can report an incident in real-time or a past incident. The good thing is that conversations are recorded for investigation reasons. Hence, a reported incidence can be investigated thoroughly and a conclusion made.
Legal Note
You need to consider this legal note on community guidelines and violations.
- You are fully responsible for your interaction with users
- Not all clubhouse users agree with what constitutes a violation, and Clubhouse has the right to determine what constitutes a violation.
- Clubhouse has the right to change the guidelines at any time and post changes on the guidelines page.
Contact
You can contact Clubhouse for any questions, queries, and suggestions.
What is the future of Clubhouse?
Clubhouse is still at the beta stage and is not open to the general public. However, more people are warming up to the app, and it might be available to the public in the future. Developers are working to ensure that the future versions are compatible with android so that the app is not only accessible by iPhone users.
Clubhouse is the next big social media app. With a current value of over $100 million and attracting big names such as Elon Musk, it is evident that the app will be one of the most excellent apps in existence.