Apr 9, 2021 9:00 AM

The Clones Are Coming for Clubhouse

Plus: MySpace's downfall, tech competition from China, and the particle going rogue.

Hi, folks. Question: Are you better off getting sick for a day after the second shot, or not feeling anything and wondering if you got a dud? Asking for a friend.

The Plain View

During our socially deprived year of lockdown, audio-based social app Clubhouse has attracted members (more than 10 million), money (over $100 million invested), and buzz (I wrote a big story about it!). Whether or not you believe in its future, Clubhouse clearly has the halo of The Next Big Thing. So it’s no surprise that other social networks are jumping to either clone it or buy it. To paraphrase the great soul singer Ann Peebles, Silicon Valley’s new tune is, “I’m gonna tear your Clubhouse down—room by room.”

Let’s take a census of the current and potential competitors. Twitter is already testing a shameless copy called Spaces, and reportedly offered $4 billion to outright buy Clubhouse. That’s four times what Clubhouse was valued at in the good old days of, um, January. Meanwhile, Spotify just purchased the company behind an audio app called Locker Room, and is expected to relaunch it as a direct Clubhouse rival. LinkedIn has also confirmed that it’s working on a Clubhouse-like feature. Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield revealed—on Clubhouse, no less!—that his company will mimic the app too. Mark Cuban is behind a Clubhouse-ian startup called Fireside. And it will not shock anyone to hear that Facebook is planning its own audio-chat feature, since government regulators would likely nix an acquisition. Leaked screenshots indicate that it looks a lot like Clubhouse.

The rising star’s most prominent foe might be the existing app Discord, which has expanded from a game-oriented conversational platform to a more general one. When I interviewed CEO Jason Citron for my Clubhouse story, he avoided specific comments about the platform, preferring to emphasize his own company’s currently superior numbers—140 million users.

Clearly, we are on the cusp of a golden age of windbaggery. Can Clubhouse stave off this avalanche of talky apps?

First of all, I would be very surprised if its founders succumbed to an acquisition offer. In my hours of conversation with Clubhouse cofounders Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, they made it clear that they have long dreamed of riding a rocketship to platform fame and glory. They are living the life of Beth Harmon in The Queen’s Gambit—what a bummer it would have been if she flipped over her king before taking on the Russian champion! As students of startup life, they learned from what happened to the Instagram founders—years after they caved to Facebook’s billion-dollar offer, Mark Zuckerberg broke his promise of independence, and they left a platform worth many times more. I expect Davison and Seth will instead embrace the experience of Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, who in 2013 spurned a $3 billion Facebook offer, even though he knew that Zuckerberg would then launch a competing product. Snap survived, and now has a market cap of $94 billion.

Clubhouse also has a chance to maintain its lead over the giants coming after it. Critics might say that Twitter, Spotify, LinkedIn, and Facebook have an advantage because of their preexisting social networks. But a social network optimized for one kind of connectedness can easily fail when mapped to a different use case. Also, though we constantly use apps like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, we don’t necessarily love them. I doubt that anyone is leaping with excitement at the prospect of more time spent on Facebook.

That doesn’t mean that Clubhouse will necessarily succeed—just that it holds the keys to its own fate. It has to navigate the tricky task of what CEO Davison calls “scaling intimacy” as it grows. It has to be more proactive in weeding out hate speech, harassment, and spamming. A big test will come in some weeks when Clubhouse finally releases an Android version, which will spur a sudden influx of new users.

And though it isn’t an immediate worry, Clubhouse will have to match other megaplatforms by building a business model that exploits its unique attributes. Currently, the plan is to allow the creators who host Clubhouse rooms to monetize their activities, and take a cut of their money. Skeptics wonder if this can bring in enough cash to make Clubhouse as profitable as the tech giants it hopes to match.

But wait. In a weird coincidence, Patreon—a relatively under-the-radar online platform that lets patrons send money to singers, writers, and artists— did a new round of funding this week that valued the company at … $4 billion. Where have I heard that number before?

I’d like to suggest a new tune for Patreon cofounder Jack Conte and his bandmate Nataly Dawn. It’s a cover song originally performed by Ann Peebles.

Time Travel

My aforementioned conversation with Discord CEO Jason Citron reminded me of a 2007 interview I did with MySpace cofounders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson for Newsweek. I was shocked at how easily they brushed off the threat from an upstart network that had only recently begun to welcome the general public. Not that I think this will happen to Discord. Ahem.

I had some bad news for Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, the founders of MySpace who now run the business for Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. They'd lost my son's high school. A year ago, he and nearly all his fellow students were fanatic MySpace cadets. But now, like bees abandoning a hive, they'd left and swarmed to Facebook. According to my 17-year-old, the same thing was happening to their (former) MySpace friends in other schools.

I'd anticipated that sharing this admittedly anecdotal item over lunch with the sharp cofounders of one of the world's most successful Internet sites would lead to an intense grilling as to why this sudden exodus occurred. (My son thinks MySpace has too many ads and the pages are ugly. He also doesn't like the spam from alleged "friends" selling ringtones and other stuff, a problem that MySpace is trying to address.) But DeWolfe and Anderson, who sold to News Corp. last year for $580 million, didn't ask. Instead, they cited statistics that showed that their numbers were strong and opined that the exodus might have been a geographical anomaly; East Coasters seem to skew toward Facebook. Anyway, Anderson said, even if some teens did jump to Facebook for their main online socializing, they would still keep coming to MySpace because of its flexibility in design and all the media it offers.

Ask Me One Thing

Henri wrote with a question about an essay he read on Medium where the author says, "If you break up the Western Tech Giants, then they will be replaced with foreign companies that you cannot regulate,” and predicts a “hurricane” is coming from China. “What do you make of it?” Henri asks.

Henri, I’ve heard this before. Notably, from Mark Zuckerberg. He seldom fails to invoke the threat of China when he appears before legislators wondering if Facebook should be broken into pieces. I don’t buy it. There’s no question that China is already challenging American dominance, in areas like microchips and AI, and far surpasses us in supply chains. But software platforms are different. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube all benefit from a network effect, but their futures will be determined by how they evolve, not by avoiding regulation. Anyway, if WhatsApp and Instagram were separated from Facebook, the US would be in a better competitive situation: Once those spinoffs were no longer bound to the needs of their respective motherships, we might get to see more innovation from them. What’s more, I disagree that we can’t regulate foreign companies. Our former president almost bullied TikTok into being owned by Oracle! China itself doesn’t seem to have a problem regulating foreign platforms. It simply bans them. I’m not necessarily advocating a breakup of the giants. Just saying if it happened, we wouldn’t exactly suffer an internet Katrina.

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

End Times Chronicle

News broke this week that “a tiny subatomic particle seems to be disobeying the known laws of physics.” Whatever happened to manners?

Last but Not Least

In case you missed it, here’s that big Clubhouse story I mentioned.

Here’s someone who thinks the next big thing should be little things.

On the internet, a wedding engagement is a bell that can’t be unrung—even if real wedding bells never chime. WIRED’s Lauren Goode knows this all too well.

A rare discussion among and about women working for NSA and Cyber Command.

Until next week,

Steven

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