Clubhouse is adding a new way to improve room discovery, with a new re-share option that will allow users to highlight interesting sessions that interest them to others. The process is Clubhouse’s take on re-Tweeting, helping to greatly amplify chats and discussions.
As Clubhouse explains:
“Now when you tap the “Share” button at the bottom of a room (or Replay), you’ll see three options: Share on Clubhouse, share via a social network, or copy the link to share via a messaging app. If you select Share on Clubhouse, you’ll be able to add a comment (e.g., “This person is rapping people’s bios and it’s insane”) and then share it to your followers. They’ll see this room in their Hallway and, if the room is live, also be notified that you shared it so they can come join you.”
One Clubhouse For Sharing
To be clear, Clubhouse has had the ‘Share via social media’ and ‘Share via messaging app’ options for some time, it’s really only this new internal sharing function that’s been added. Discovery remains to be a persistent issue across audio social platforms, as it was with video live-streaming when it first came to be. While giving everyone the ability to stream does have certain benefits, from an audience building-standpoint, it also means that there will be a lot of low-quality broadcasts that’ll get thrown in the mix.
The same is encountered by every video app, with initial hype drawing audiences in, only for quality-related issues to have them leave just as quickly later on. Blab founder Shaan Puri summed up the challenges with live-stream quality in his announcement of the platform’s closing back in 2016. Puri notes that the real issue lies in showcasing the best live-streaming content in real-time. While people will reliably tune into the best and most relevant broadcasts, they need to know when it’ll happen to do so. Meaning that if platforms want to succeed on this front, then they will need to come up with better algorithms and recommendation processes to highlight and report just such streams.
So far, no platform has gotten it right, at least not yet. Clubhouse’s new share option, however, is a step in the right direction. It’s unlikely to be a game-changer, but hopefully, it’ll lead to groundbreaking innovation.
The real value would lie in being able to create a stable recommendation system, one that would let you know, as soon as you listen, what else you should tune into, kind of like TikTok’s ‘For You’ feed, or Netflix’s ‘Because You Watched…” recommendations.
Besides these new share options, Clubhouse is said to also be launching new analytics, with share clip counts now displayed at the bottom of each room. A new Room insights page is currently in the works. On other fronts, Clubhouse is also looking to add ‘Web Listening’, which will enable you to listen to a Room from your phone or computer, without needing to download the app.
The Wrap
It’s hard to gauge the future that Clubhouse will have, but in saying so, we also give it the benefit of at least having a future. Clubhouse was a much-welcomed star during the early parts of last year, with some even touting it as the future of social connection. However, competition rose and Clubhouse soon found itself at the mercy of waves of irrelevance, with non-contextual rooms popping up way too often.
Nevertheless, app downloads still rose from 1.8 to 2.6 million back in December, and while it continues to lose US users, the opposite is happening in India, which is not Clubhouse’s largest market. In any case, there is still potential for the app, which it hopefully fully meets as it continues to evolve.
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