Clubhouse, the app where throat chakras go to get noosed.
This easily qualifies in the Audibyte category At The Dinner Table!. I haven’t been on this app in approximately 7 months, and that isn’t counting the times I scroll through the titles of each room hoping that it would draw enough of an appeal up for me to enter.
It doesn’t though. It just doesn’t.
I often remind myself that my frustration with this app is not connected to the suggestion that “it just ain’t for the weak”. It is hard to get good information or get into good conversations once the speaker count reaches over 10+ people, and without good, consistent moderation the conversational rails detract from the main goal of the room. It is easy however, to get into something casual if you want to drift from room to room and listen to a little bit of this, or a little bit of that. Much like a tv channel, you surf down the aisles looking for something good. Over time though, the drama is what reels in the empathetic and those who desire to clarify and understand what is happening in a room. Unfortunately, this is a cycle. Once it is understood that this is a cycle, it looks more like a trap.
And then you have small rooms that appear to function very well, where nobody but who the moderators know are on stage. Then you realize why they are small. You are visiting a home where you can hear everything that is going on inside, but every single door is locked, and the path to the front door is more like approaching an armed security system with minefields hidden underground.
I came into this app during its premiere, where it was impossible to get onto the app without a direct invite from someone who was directly invited onto the app. I know what the app intended to attract from its user base because I was one of them, and for a while, this was panning out pretty well. You would find me in introvert rooms, music rooms, poetry rooms. Friendships and romances were budding and friendliness towards newcomers were abundant. Easily two months in though, this stopped being the case, especially once the app was publicly available to those with a phone capable of downloading it from an app store.
The more new users, the more my usage dropped. As my usage of the app dropped, the more flagrant and foul the overall app atmosphere became. The temptation to restore what was left from the beginning stages was strong but the accessibility made it too attractive for open mouths to be fed. And fed the users were.
Now, it seems to be how practicing bullies get their home-schooling. A digital penitentiary if you will.
I made mention of the throat chakra and the noose to start this digest, and it is no joke. It is far too easy to feel at home on this app, as if you were speaking to a best friend or friends. not only because you can, but because you get to discuss whatever you want from the comfort of your home, with very little danger or harm brought to your person. Yet it is exactly these characteristics that attract those with shorter-than-average attention spans. The average quality of any one room out of 15 can enlighten an individual on how well a room can stay on topic without needing crowd control over small misunderstandings and personal slights. Hosting a quality room with intelligent discourse is a wet dream, but without intentional moderators and attending hosts, it is a dry, pipe dream.
I cannot imagine the throat chakra or a well functioning esophagus agreeing with dry pipes.
So I say, spare yourself the dream. The digital world was meant to facilitate real world discussion, not the other way around. Clubhouse is better left as a conversational conductor for those who have yet to develop real world interpersonal skills.
Cheers!
At The Dinner Table 