Based on results and current observations, discovery seems to play a key role in maximizing audio social take-up, which is something that continuously challenges both Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces. These two distinct audio-social channels have faced various challenges that are rooted in providing users with the most  relevant broadcasts in real-time. It’s that struggle in providing hyper-relevant broadcasts that limits optimal interest in both apps, and is something that has presumably led to Clubhouse’s latest update.

Additional Audio Context Clues

Clubhouse is taking a significant step forward in addressing its prevalent discovery challenges by introducing an expanded range of selectable topic options to help users pinpoint more granular and niche interests. Additionally, it’s also giving users more options to follow specific topics, and to better connect with other like-minded users.

Clubhouse will be launching new topic pages, which will highlight the top search results, including rooms and users, based on their level of relation to each selected topic. This way, it actually makes it easier for users to stay connected and up-to-date on popular broadcasts and presenters. Clubhouse also notes that it’s in the process of making its topics more niche, stating that:

“We’re adding thousands more detailed and granular topics, so you can search for a topic like “The Dodgers” instead of searching for “baseball” – or your city, university, academic interests or favorite sub-genres of music.”

Courtesy of @whimchic, Clubhouse will also now supposedly list topics on user profiles, better connecting users to their related interests, while simultaneously receiving alerts whenever said topics go live.

Lastly, Clubhouse is also adding topic listings to rooms, which allows creators to add topic tags during the room-creation process. It’s not something that provides a whole lot of context, but some context is better than none. Besides, both Clubhouse and Twitter have found it challenging to highlight which rooms are most relevant to users in real-time, with both platforms’ tabs and tools being effectively summarized as “heaping piles of junk”; they’re not useless per se, but that the way they function might just be too janky.

In addition to new and improved topic tags, Clubhouse is also adding support for more languages, with 13 additions set to release on Android. iOS is scheduled to follow shortly after. The new languages include Arabic, Bengali, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Farsi/Persian, Hausa, Igbo, Marathi, Nepali, Somali, Thai, Turkish, and Yoruba. Expanding language support is important for the app’s still-ongoing growth because more language options encourages more optimal reception in regions that have more spoken dialects. India, being its current largest market, has 22 official languages.

The Wrap

Clubhouse had something really good going for it in the beginning, top influencers and thought leaders even lauded it for its invite-only mechanic and the opportunity it presented in providing a more private platform for broadcasting and sharing highly relevant ‘chat rooms.’ It lost most of that initial momentum upon an ‘open’ release after being acquired by Apple, and has since struggled to reclaim much of the wasted traction.

However, this new, though minor, addition does help the app gradually gain interest among various users. It presents us with one of the paradigms that both old and new social platforms can experience, and it’s that hype and decline of a platform can happen at a  moment’s notice. The erratic status of Clubhouse does hold important insight, and it probably realizes and makes use of this fact in order to better direct its focus and efforts into improving its offers. Right now, Twitter Spaces dominates the audio-social scene, but it’s not too late for Clubhouse to at least catch-up and secure a solid 1st-runner up slot.

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Sources

https://bit.ly/3DjbGVg