Clubhouse’s Fall From Grace

Hi, everyone. There’s a silver lining, however threadbare, to the Ukraine invasion. Seeing the horrors of the Russian assault reminds us how petty our usual gripes are. Please help the Ukrainian people.

The Plain View

Clubhouse is losing its lullaby. This week Axel Mansoor broke the news that he is pulling his popular Lullaby Club—a virtual room full of sleepytime talk and music—from the once-sizzling-hot social audio app. This is no small thing. Lullaby Club, which had 67,000 members, was one of the platform’s most popular gathering places, deemed worthy of a New York Times profile. For a few weeks Mansoor was even the literal face of Clubhouse, the image of his beaming visage on the app’s icon.

But by the end of this month, the lullabies will be gone, Mansoor explained to a heartbroken crowd of followers in, appropriately, a Clubhouse room. Lullaby Club is moving to a new audio service run by—brace yourself—Amazon. Yes, the ecommerce and entertainment giant has joined Twitter, Meta, and others in producing would-be Clubhouse killers.

Over the past few months, a sorrowful narrative has taken hold: Clubhouse, everyone’s social media crush during the pandemic, couldn’t handle its own hype. It grew too fast and wasn’t prepared for the sudden crowds. Junky rooms full of stuff like multi-level marketing schemes dominated. Competitors took advantage. “It feels like that original period was a fever dream,” says Sarah Szalavitz, a frequent habitué I met when doing my big feature about Clubhouse a year ago. She hardly goes there any more, despite her warm feelings about time spent on the app. Mansoor, too, has a deep emotional attachment, saying in his farewell that Clubhouse will always be home to him. But he’s leaving nonetheless and hinted that other popular creators might follow him out the door. That would be a brutal blow, considering Clubhouse’s founders have always insisted that pleasing creators was their North Star. (For the record, Clubhouse wishes Mansoor well: “We have creators of all kinds finding their voice and we’re excited when we see members of the Clubhouse community land lucrative deals.”)

Is Clubhouse over? As you might expect, its leaders don’t think so. Their argument is that after the burst of hype, during which the platform grew like kudzu and was just as unruly, a more stable and deliberate growth is now allowing the company to build a sustainable infrastructure for the long term. When Clubhouse was buzzy, you could count its workers on your fingers. But after a $100 million funding round that valued the company at $4 billion, Clubhouse now has just under 100 employees, and it’s creating new features, growing communities, and, yes, trying to moderate conversations when they get vile.

“When we started Clubhouse, our entire model was to grow at a measured pace,” says cofounder Paul Davison. “We’ve definitely had periods over the past year and a half where the growth has stressed our infrastructure. Our goal has always just been to focus on the long term. And it's nice to be in a place where we have more stability.” That’s a deft way to spin it. In recent months, Clubhouse downloads have hovered between 2 million and 3 million. That’s not bad, but a lower trajectory than one would have suspected when people rushed in after the platform ended its invite-only policy. (At one point in early 2021, the user base doubled in a month, from roughly 2 million to 4 million.)

But Davison doesn’t think we should be focusing on those numbers. A more important metric might be that those signing on to Clubhouse spend more than 70 minutes on it in a day. Also, he warned against using the size of a given room to judge Clubhouse’s progress. A huge percentage of the 700,000 Clubhouse rooms formed every day, he says, are modest social rooms not visible to those who aren’t followed or explicitly welcomed by the moderators. It’s like the dark matter of Clubhouse.

Those social users are a different demographic than the original crowd, which was heavy on the tech sector. “When I came in, there was definitely this perception that Clubhouse was, like, tech bros, right?” says Maya Watson, Clubhouse’s global head of marketing. “You had these big moments, which was cool. But our power users today are young, they're BIPOC, they're super sticky. They're in small groups. They're playing games. There's a D&D club that has 7,000 members.”

Clubhouse claims that this purely social interaction—as opposed to broadcast-style public rooms where most people just listen—serves an audience that Clubhouse’s mass-market competitors aren’t courting. And celebrities do still drop in: Recently, Dolly Parton and Snoop Dogg made appearances. (Not together, though I’d definitely check out that room.)

I opened the app again recently and found that the rooms I wanted to visit weren’t as packed as they were during the fever dream days, and I had trouble finding compelling rooms. (This might have been because my preferences were outdated, and some of the people I followed a year ago had left.) But I was impressed by a plethora of new features. There’s now a direct-messaging feature called Backchannel (where did they get that idea?) and improved ways to share rooms in real time. Moderators and speakers can also share links with everyone in a room. But the biggest change was to give moderators the option to record the entire session for later replay. That removes one exciting and sometimes frustrating element of the old Clubhouse—the magic of knowing that the special moments were ephemeral. But overall, replays make Clubhouse better. Even lightning caught in a bottle can be illuminating.

No, Clubhouse isn’t ready for the morgue. And I think it has a fighting chance to succeed. But it has tremendous challenges, not least from competitors. During the Ukraine invasion, hundreds of thousands of users jammed into Clubhouse rooms that chewed over the implications, some with expert speakers or people offering observations in-country. But without even looking for it, one day I found myself alerted to a Twitter Spaces conversation about Ukraine with thousands of participants. Since I was already in the app, the discussion was only a click away. It showed what Clubhouse is up against. Though Clubhouse might be, as one person noted in the Lullaby farewell discussion, “the Rolls Royce of audio apps,” its big tech competitors can draw from existing customer bases of billions to lure people into their audio rooms. And valid or not, Clubhouse is saddled with the perception that its moment has passed.

“Blowing up overnight does more harm than good,” Mansoor said about his future former home. “Once you fall from grace, it’s really hard to get back.”

Time Travel

When I wrote about Clubhouse almost exactly a year ago, I had a lot of good things to say. But I was definitely concerned about the impact of its unrestrained growth.

In a July blog post, [Paul] Davison and [Rohan] Seth promised more detailed community standards. The post also addressed the pleas of the thousands clamoring for an invitation, some of which were going for hundreds of dollars on eBay. “We think it’s important to grow communities slowly, rather than 10X-ing the user base overnight,” they wrote. “This helps ensure that things don’t break, keeps the composition of the community diverse, and allows us to tune the product as it grows.”

Davison and Seth were trying not to replicate the sins of Facebook, where a reckless early pursuit of growth led to Mark Zuckerberg’s current woes with content moderation. But Clubhouse’s slow approach wouldn’t last the year …

By mid-January floodgates had opened. Within a month, the number of users had jumped from about 200,000 to more than 2 million; meanwhile, the company still had just nine employees and some contractors who moderated content. A month later, there were 4 million users. Thousands of rooms were open at any given time and 10,000 clubs had formed. It was exactly the quick, exponential growth that Davison had sworn to forgo. It was as if Pittsfield, Massachusetts, had grown to the size of Boston in six weeks. In another month, Clubhouse had more people than New York City.

Ask Me One Thing

Scott asks, “Is there any chance of you doing a follow-up book to Artificial Life?”

Thanks, Scott. I also appreciate that you shared how the book inspired you to pursue a career in AI and machine learning. Now I need to figure out what my cut should be.

Published 30 years ago(!), Artificial Life focused on emergent, lifelike phenomena in the digital realm. I did discuss neural nets as part of that but only minimally. Who knew that these would become the backbone to driving AI into a powerful mainstream force in our lives? If I were doing a follow-up to the book, I’d definitely go into that story, as well as advances in synthetic biology. In fact, whenever I can find the time, I’m planning to write either a new chapter, a preface, or an afterword to talk about those things. Those are the only things holding back the book’s overdue appearance in audio and ebook.

But don’t expect a book-length follow-up. After spending years on a specific topic, I’m happy to turn to new subjects and let other authors have their say. (As a kindness, I leave crumbs behind.) Still, in the larger picture, I see all my books, with the exception of a true crime tale, as part of one big story—how the digital revolution changed everything. And when people ask for a sequel to Hackers, I tell them that I’ve been writing those sequels all along.

You can submit questions to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.

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