Clubhouse Shifts Focus to Group Messaging from Live Audio

Clubhouse, a popular social media platform during the pandemic, made headlines when it revealed plans to lay off 50% of its workforce in order to focus on developing “Clubhouse 2.0.” The company has now unveiled the outcome of this major overhaul, introducing a redesigned version aimed at transforming Clubhouse into a messaging app.

The voice app is transitioning from its signature “drop-in” voice chats to friend-centric voice chats, the company said in an update. Instead of hosting vast rooms where users host live chats open to all users of the app, the new Clubhouse encourages users to join groups with people they know.

Groups are somewhat confusingly called “chats” and allow friends and friends to exchange audio messages. There’s still a “drop-in” element, but it’s less focused on real-time talking and more geared toward the Instagram story — a destination for checking in and sharing quick updates. The app also ditches text-based direct messages in favor of private voice messages, which yes, it plays to voicemail or virtual machines.

However, the biggest change is not only the format of the conversations, but the fact that Clubhouse now positions itself more like Snapchat, where smaller Groups of Friends communicate privately or semi-privately, than Twitter, where all the users of the application are shouting into the void. “It’s not about passively listening to people talk,” the company wrote in an update. “You can listen to great conversations on podcasts, YouTube, TikTok and many other platforms. It’s about talking to people… and making friends with real-life friends of friends of friends and people you’d never have met.”

While the move to a messaging app might make more sense given Clubhouse’s sharp decline in engagement after pandemic restrictions eased, it’s unclear whether the company can return to the highs of 2021, when it attracted millions of users and several billion. – appreciation of the dollar. Clubhouse, whose founders claimed earlier this year that they had “years of runway left,” seems to bea second time they will not take success for granted.

They ended their announcement of the redesign with a bit of caution. “It’s a big bet, and we hope we’re right…”