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There is a new exclusive club online - and only those who are invited are allowed to participate.

“Clubhouse” is the name of a new social media app from San Francisco, which is becoming a hype in this country too.

The idea behind it: users send their contributions as small audio snippets and can thus have a conversation in groups without everyone chattering at the same time.

Users can open groups, so-called rooms, in which they determine who can speak.

This makes virtual discussions in front of an audience possible.

The start-up behind it was founded in March 2020 by ex-Google employees Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, initially the app was just an insider tip in the start-up scene on the US west coast.

The valuation of "Clubhouse" is already at 100 million dollars

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But in recent weeks more and more celebrities have discovered the app for themselves, including the US presenter Oprah Winfrey, the rapper Drake, the actors Jared Leto and Ashton Kutcher.

The start-up was promptly financed in an initial financing round by the legendary venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz - and is already valued at 100 million dollars.

Now the hype wave has spilled over to Germany, and celebrities in this country are promptly discovering the app - for example, one of the most popular German “clubhouse” groups was the “capital whisper” with FDP leader Christian Lindner as a participant over the weekend.

Part of the hype is a feeling of exclusivity that the app conveys.

Because only those who are invited by other users can participate.

In addition, the “Clubhouse” app required for this has so far only been available in Apple's app store.

Android users - the vast majority of all smartphone owners - are left out.

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Those who are already there are currently praising the level of the discussion groups, and the audio interaction creates a feeling of intimacy, something like at a good dinner party.

The app seems to benefit massively from the lockdowns caused by the pandemic - while real conversations in loose groups are currently difficult to implement, "Clubhouse" provides a good alternative.

The app can always shine when proven experts come together on a subject and host pre-planned public discussion groups on your special topic using the calendar function.

Then “Clubhouse” becomes a mixture of podcast, lecture and live discussion at a high level.

But the hype factors - both intimacy and exclusivity - are only real to a limited extent: “Clubhouse” is still not publishing any current user numbers, but some celebrities already have more than 500,000 followers.

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And the intimacy is also limited.

As on Twitter, what is spoken is public.

Not only can users in the rooms follow every conversation, the app also stores copies of the conversations for moderation purposes.

Private address books on foreign servers

“Clubhouse” also threatens to repeat the mistakes of other social networks: If you want to participate in the hype and send out invitations yourself, you first have to reveal your entire smartphone address book.

The tech journalist and moderator Richard Gutjahr on Twitter comments where this is going: “People, seriously: 7 clubhouse invitations to my private mobile number in the last 2 hours alone?

Do you upload your entire telephone address book to a foreign server everywhere - without consulting those affected? "

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Strictly speaking, users are even committing a data protection violation if they do not obtain the consent of the data subject for the upload to the server of a US company.

The function is extremely useful for “Clubhouse”. By evaluating the address books, the creators could, for example, analyze contact networks among the users of the app and later make recommendations for new invitations.

The topic of moderation of extreme or hateful content has not yet been seriously addressed by “Clubhouse”.

Founder Davison announced in October via Twitter that the so-called hosts of a conversation would get extended moderation functions.

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However, the regulation on “Clubhouse” is initially based almost exclusively on a reporting system.

Participants in a conversation have to complain and mark content so that the moderators of the app can intervene.

However, this moderation mechanism, which is also known from other social networks, only works as long as not all participants in a group agree on their hatred of something and do not report anything.

The new rights of the supporters of still-US President Donald Trump promptly discovered the app for themselves.

According to reports from scene observers, the storming of the Capitol was announced in private chat rooms on “Clubhouse” as well as on “Parler”, which was recently banned from the app stores.

Right-wing actors known from other networks are willingly invited as speakers in “clubhouse” rooms, and users willingly spread their prejudices in spoken comments.

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The question now is how long “Clubhouse” can keep the hype alive - because at least the factor of exclusivity is short-lived given the success of the app.

If every user asks half a dozen new friends, the number of users grows exponentially, then the only limiting factor remains the restriction to Apple devices.

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And the celebrity factor then becomes irrelevant - it is questionable whether the celebrities will continue to use the app publicly as before, given the onslaught of "ordinary" users.

Last but not least, the problem of moderation remains: At least in this country, it is likely that the app will find it difficult to meet the requirements of social media legislation and to recognize and block repeatedly posted illegal hate content in good time, because classic text and image filters work for audio content Not.

"Chancellor sees it as problematic that the accounts have been blocked"

It was probably the most popular way for the US president to get his news out.

Now his account with the short message service Twitter has been blocked.

Chancellor Merkel sees this as problematic.

Source: WORLD