The Invite-Only Dynamics of Clubhouse’s Rise and Fail

The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Cindy Fang, whose interest is in the early days of the Clubhouse social media platform – an invite-only audio app that became popular during the COVID-19 pandemic and attracted a number of high-profile users (including Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk). This userbase can be understood as a networked public, structured by the platform’s affordances – or in this case, networked listeners and active producers of content.

Clubhouse also provided a sense of community, with audio streams and comments on that content; this produces some social capital for prominent participants which is embedded in its social networks. Given the invite-only social structure, what kinds of networks emerged on the platform in its early days, then?

Data on the platform was sourced from Kaggle, and contained early invitation information (including on who invited whom), and were visualised as networks using Gephi. This showed the emergence of a number of large networks, connected by shared invitations – with one node sharing some 140 invitations alone. Many of the early community leaders came from a venture capital background, and individuals were divided by their network hierarchies and constrained within their social capital networks. Venture capitalists were the invisible hands that drove the platform’s early growth, and this reinforced pre-existing social structures rather than enabling alternative networks to evolve. The ‘coolness’ factor that drives the viral emergence of some new social media platforms was absent here, and this may explain why the platform failed to establish itself as an ongoing concern.