Clubhouse, the invite-only audio chat app that has enamoured the tech industry elite, is on the lookout for influencers. Because what social media app can be without influencers?
In a town hall on Sunday, the company announced that it was creating “Clubhouse Creator First,” its first creator accelerator program. The program aims to support and equip 20 creators with the resources they need to host good conversations, build their audiences, and monetise, per Clubhouse. The deadline to submit applications is March 31.
While that’s all fine and dandy — heaven knows I love following cat influencers on Instagram and TikTok, and yes that’s a thing — Clubhouse should probably consider making its influencers easy to find. (It should also focus on tightening its security, but that’s a different story).
As pointed out by Wired, it’s not exactly easy to get an idea of what someone is like just by looking at their Clubhouse profile (although a brave user did try and came up with this list). In contrast to Instagram and TikTok, you can’t just scroll through someone’s previous Clubhouse chats, see how many conversations a user has participated in, or how many people liked listening to them. No, you have to wait for the user to enter a room, listen to what they say, and then decide if you want to follow them.
I mean, no offence to Clubhouse, but I don’t know if I have the patience for that. Who knows, maybe it’s me who’s missing out. (Disclosure: I’m not on Clubhouse).
Besides announcing its accelerator program, Clubhouse also shared a few product updates. Users will now be able to share a link to their profiles or clubs and invite new users to the platform via their phone number.
This means that Clubhouse will no longer need to access ask users for access to their phone contacts in order to let them send invites. Users can reach out to the company to ask it to delete previously uploaded contacts, the Verge reported, and a tool to delete previously uploaded contacts is in the works. In addition, Clubhouse will remember the language of the rooms users tend to join and filter the others.