So, the next week and and really spend most of the time answering questions that people have submitted throughout the course of the week so we used to take we used to do all of it live and it was like really free for them in the early day we basically have the whole room come up on stage and we just sort of talk, and then turns out that doesn't really scale as you grow. And so we want to make sure we get to the most important questions so what we do is we take them in advance. And if you go to support dot join clubhouse calm and you scroll the bottom there's a link where you can submit questions for Town Hall. And so we collect those throughout the week you can submit them any time. And then if you have a question during during Town Hall, you can submit it to and we'll try and get to it at the end. We you we try and keep it to one hour, so that people can get back to their weekends, and we usually go like one hour and four minutes or seven minutes or two minutes, something like that, but we try not to take too long. And with that, let's get started so let's bring up stuff. Talk about the highlights from the week. Staff Simon. Come on up on new I'll make you a mod.
Thank you. Thank you.
And there's
more Morning guys morning stuff.
I Paul when you first got on you had a little twinge in your voice I was like I was like you're not.
Paul's half British in case you didn't
know he actually threw that out last night.
I know, I don't know.
For a time, but that's that's pretty much orientation.
All right. Well, this week our team spent time connecting with many of you outside the states to check in and see how the experience of clubhouse was translating. And as I was sort of going back over these conversations that got me thinking that, even before we had so many people from around the world on clubhouse so often I felt a key role in each room is this role of the interpreter or the translator. And so this week, we took a particular look at cultural translation on clubhouse. And what does that mean the concept is simple. Cultural translation is being sensitive and aware of all the nuances that language, Art Education Technology and more, and their impact to create space for the exchange of knowledge between people with different backgrounds expertise or set of beliefs. So, this week the community has hosted rooms full of international minds perspectives and backgrounds and you support each other in incredible ways by creating space for the differently abled community to be heard and felt. Thank you, abraxis and Tiffany you. You're breaking barriers to understand the transition from physical to digital art with NF T's with very special hosts like people blouse Steve Aoki Diplo Paris Hilton and many more lots and lots of musicians in the NFT space, shared challenges and uprising journeys in the most intimate ways and rooms, within a AAPI community with the stop Asian hate campaigns and there's been several rooms that have been hosted around this. Utilize humor and levity and unlikely moments and characters with Malcolm McDowell, hosted by ash Adelson and Wesley Snipes by Nate Jones are learning more about the power of voice as an instrument, rather than a medium with Roger lover, via the club pod, and you trace the Hidden History of cooperation and communalism in the US, with ex Obama dietsch Digital Chief Officer Michael slavey discussing his new release book for all the people that was hosted by, in my opinion one of the best cultural interpreters, I know, James Andrews and the authenticated. And I think you've helped us imagine the future of finance music heritage and technology with Barbara and Bernard Steve Mark tocci from splice Dan Hicks, and my former boss will I am. We love to see you guys host each other and teach each other in this way and like I said I think you'll probably sit in rooms now and think about who in the rooms are sort of acting as these cultural interpretated interpreters. And that's it for this week.
Thank you, Steph, I always really enjoyed listening to the week's highlights because there are all these things that happen that that I didn't actually know about. And it's always really inspiring so I appreciate you taking the time to summarize all the stuff I was in that room with NACA McDowell last night it was so good. It was, it was incredible. But
my favorite part was the news like the drama radio and I was like, Yes.
Yeah, he was incredible. He was so good. All right. Well, thank you so much Steph and thank you everyone who Steph mentioned for, for all the incredible conversations that were hosted this past week, excited to see what this week holds. All right, getting into product so we we push the release out a few days ago, and apologies for the shifting timing there, we, we actually like we always try to give guidance on when releases are going to come out we're usually wrong because startups, you know. But, but, but there are sometimes like, you know, things that we find in QA or like the release takes longer than expected to get approved or things like that can happen so every time we get deadlines, please consider them approximate and always grateful for your patience on that stuff and things take longer than expected, but we got to release out a few days ago, and want to talk through some of the highlights there. The biggest one is club creation directly in the app, which I'm really excited about I know that I know that the support team is really excited about because we've been doing this manually we've been getting lots and lots of requests for them so this one is a long time coming, and very, very grateful for everyone's patience on that but the way it works right now is, if you have an idea for a recurring show that you'd like to host or a community that you want to start or a private group that you'd like to create. You can now do it directly in the app. And in clubs for anyone who doesn't know they're they're basically like groups, right people use them in lots of different ways. Typically the three that I mentioned just now so it's either like one person or a couple people who are the recurring hosts of the show, and they set up a club as kind of like an event series, so you have the name of the club people can follow the club to get notified every time and that club host conversations in the middle has conversations every day or every week, or perhaps at a different cadence but it's really like a public event series that they want people to be able to follow. The second way people use them is to create communities. So maybe people are really into. Oh man, I don't even know like street fashion, or, or EDM or, or, like, you know, parenting or maybe it's like a location based community or community where people want to come together and speak French or Japanese people use that as like a community and then the third group of people, I would say tend to use it as like a private organization so they'll create a club for everyone. That works at their company, or for a group of friends that they have, or for an organization that are a part of. It's a pretty flexible container so if you want to create a club for any of those things. Go to your profile. Scroll down to the list of clubs that you are a member of and then scroll to the right and at the end of that list you'll see a plus button is a place to go add a new club, and you'll be able to create it there and add all the basic information and just get it started. Schedule your first event invite a few people to be part of your club. And if you have any questions, just reach out anytime. One thing to note is that we're trying to. We're trying to roll it out in a not too crazy way so that there isn't abuse or spam or anything like that. And so we can spot any issues early so what we did is we limited who can create a club, but it's not a strong limitation it just, you know, if you've been on the app a little while, if you tried speaking a few times, you know if if you have a few followers that sort of thing, it you should be able to create a club right now so most people should be able to, and we're going to open it up beyond that, but we just wanted to roll it out somewhat slowly, and then you can also only create two clubs, a month right now, which hopefully should be enough if he you know if you're really invested in the club takes up your time that having more than two would probably be a challenge anyway so. So that was the big thing that we pushed out last week really really excited about that we've seen an explosion in the number of clubs that are getting created, not surprisingly, and sort of amazing new formats and, and creations from people so really really excited about that. A few other things that we did in this past week one is, we added the ability to switch to higher quality audio, we just want to test out and see how this works. So when you're speaking in a room. If you tap the ellipsis the three dots in the upper right, it'll say audio quality and you can tap on that and you can switch to high, medium or low, high is best if you are doing a performance you're singing or, or if you just want people to hear you more clearly, it doesn't affect how you hear the audio it affects how people do
it you might think why would I ever switch to low quality, but low quality could be something that you could switch to. If you're having connection issues if your network is bad, and you just want it to be more reliable. In the future I imagine will will default to just an automatic load that scales up and down based on your network strength, but for now we just wanted to see how it felt so we introduced those modes, so feel free to play around with that. We added a fix for cross border invites there was an issue where if you tried to invite someone from a different country it might get confused about the country code and prefilled with the wrong number. So we fix that, if you think this might have affected any of your invites you go to the invite screen, there's a little button where you can see all the pending invites all the ones that you've tried to send to people but haven't been accepted yet, and you can go resend it and that should work. We made some improvements to accessibility and voiceover thanks to some really good feedback we got from the 15% Club, and so that should be better now. We made some improvements to how troll reporting works to reduce any incidence of false negative false positives there, we simplify the calendar by taking away the all events option because that would getting totally out of hand and not very usable. And then we've improved some policy suggestions for international users I think we've grown really quickly internationally and a lot of the people that we're getting suggestions to follow people that were, you know, largely English speakers and so we've tried to localize those so they can be more relevant to people, regardless of where you live. And then we also made a few updates to our community guidelines that talk about like prohibited activity and gives more detail on how account suspensions work, then updating the privacy policy to clarify some stuff and answer some questions we had around how friend connections work. And there's also some language in there around data sharing that suggested we had the, you know, we reserve the right to share data with certain partners we don't do that we have never done that we have never shared data with affiliates or data brokers or advertising platforms, and we do not intend to so we just took all of that language out to eliminate confusion there so sorry about that. If you ever saw that and we're confused by that. Next up, got a bunch of stuff in the works for release that we were hoping to get out, end of week, which we count as Sunday at midnight, hopefully, hopefully we'll get it, you know, tomorrow, but but TBD depending on how things go. The main things that we want to get there we want to get down there a bunch of work on tooling for trust and safety to improve the speed and quality of the work that we do there. The ability to link to your profile so you'll be able to grab a link to your profile and share it with anyone you want to tell them to follow you on clubhouse. Same thing for clubs you'll be able to grab a link to your club and share that with people anywhere you like. If you have a group somewhere or you have an audience somewhere that you want to share it with. We're doing some more work around language filtering. As we've grown a lot. Internationally, you might have seen that, that, you know, a lot of rooms in your feed that are not in a language that you speak and that's obviously not a good experience so we're trying to automatically. Understand what language, rooms are, and what languages, you're interested in, so that we can filter those out of your feed for you in the future we'll probably have something more explicit where you can say I'd like to see rooms and languages x y z. But in the meantime, if we can just improve the quality of there automatically for you. We think that'll be helpful, because at any given time there are 1000s and 1000s of rooms happening all over the world. And you only see a very small subset of them based on who you follow, and what clubs, you're a part of. And if you want to see different rooms you follow different people if you want to see more rooms follow more people. And our job is to try to show you the most interesting three rooms above the fold every single time you open the app. And so we're constantly working to get better and better at that and language filtering is one that feels like feels like it's in need of some love so that's what we've been working on last couple days more work on improving follow suggestions and basically like a lot of work under the hood to help with trust and safety with follow suggestions with group suggestions notification algorithms. And I think it's coming up on time for a new app icon too so to keep your eye out for all of that early this coming week. And with that. Okay, any questions this week on.
No questions at all. What I was actually going to say is as a reminder, if you want to submit questions live you can still do that, go to your user profile, tap on the gear icon at the top. Go to FAQ contact us and then scroll down to where it says submit a question for downfall. And we will try our best to get those in towards the end. If we can batch our questions like we've been trying to do which I think has been pretty successful we've been able to get through
more questions recently, because I'm always extremely concise so that helps.
Exactly. That's the other important reason as you've got products. Okay, and let's let's do it, and we'll see where we get. All right. So, not surprisingly, a lot of questions related to clubs this week, I imagine with a lot of excitement around the club's being in app now so I'm going to roll through a bunch of these, I think it'd be great. All right, first question, actually it's a comment and a question I was excited to see the new clubs feature, I tried to create one but I couldn't. What are the criteria for getting a club. When will it be open to everyone. So I think you already touched on this a bit but
yeah let me, let me just touch on it. See if I missed anything so the main reason we we did it is because if we just had unlimited clubs and anyone can do it you can imagine. People might come on and try to like the thing about flamands is, we're building it for everyone in the world. And the reality is, like, there are bad actors in the world and there are people that, that, you know, aren't necessarily ill intention but but enjoy testing the limits of systems and trying things out and so you can imagine if we had no limits people would come on and just create like 1000s of clubs, or maybe like try and try and like get all these names because they think that like names need to be unique and they're gonna squat on all of them and reserve all of them and I you know even beyond that there might just be a lot of people who are testing the feature out, but don't really intend to host conversations when so when you go to browse clubs by topic you go to search for clubs, you might just be flooded with kind of these stubs of clubs that don't really have any content or any followers behind them. And so we tried to impose some basic limitations to keep it to people who, who are genuinely interested in hosting conversations. And that was the reason why we do it and whenever we do any kind of rate limiting it's just to try to protect the user experience and prevent people from getting any form of spam. And so, right now like. We actually like I shouldn't tell exactly what all the parameters are because that will allow people to do that stuff but basically like it's it's meant to be. It's meant to prevent for people who like just created an account. So if you didn't just create the account, you know you tried speaking, you have some people who follow you, stuff like that, and it should cover most people. So I think, I think if someone comes on, and they're unable to create a club that that should probably be pretty rare. If you find that happening just, you know, check back, check back in a few days check back in a week, something like that. And if you've just been generally active on the app like it should be fine. And we want to open it up more broadly. Soon, but but we just wanted to kind of control the roll out a little bit so it's a good experience for everyone. And the other thing that I mentioned is you can only form two clubs, a month, right now. And like all things that that we tune in as you get better and better and better over time. But hopefully, if you've been wanting to club. This should. this should cover you. And it's been it's been amazing like it's been so cool seeing all the different clubs that have been getting created there. There's so many people who, who have been on the app for a while, and, and they're just like dipping in with with like more formally hosting conversations and it just makes me so it makes me so excited. So, can't wait to see where all that stuff goes,
and we've gotten a couple of questions about the two club limit about like whether being an admin of someone else's club counts against that and I think the answer to that is now, just for clarity.
Oh good, I didn't know what the answer to that was.
Yes, we like collaboration so a lot of people want to be admins of other other friends clubs as well. Okay, few more questions about clubs. How do you expect clubs to be used differently. Now that they are in the app. Interesting expansive question.
I think that I think that creativity will accelerate. And so, I don't know I think like all of information technology is about reducing friction right you probably ever seen. And like, It's always amazing how seemingly small reductions in friction have a massive impact on, on, like, usage, and in frequency, like examples I think about sometimes are like when, when Netflix introduced the streaming option years ago, I changed my viewing behavior to only watch stuff that was available through streaming right like it's easy it was easy enough to like Malan DVDs, but it's easier to just change your viewing behavior and only watch streaming stuff or, or with Amazon prime plus one click like very often I I don't shop around I just buy it from there. And I probably save money if I did shop around but it's it's easier to just do that or we're like Facebook having a Like button versus making you type in I like this it's orders of magnitude more usage. Right. And so I think that I think that having to when when clubs are still in pilot having to write in and request the club and wait for it, it's just a lot of friction. Right. And if you can reduce that. and if someone has an idea they can jump in and, you know, just create the club and try putting an event in the calendar and adding a few people to it. I think that people are going to do it a lot more often, which means that there's going to be a lot more experimentation, which means people are going to learn about new formats and explore new formats and see other people's new formats, a lot faster. And so, I don't expect it to be fundamentally different. I just think that where we would have gotten over the course of months, we might get over the course of weeks or days. And, and that's the really exciting thing about it, there's nothing fundamentally different about having club creation in the app. And just, it's just accelerate everything.
Yep. Totally it's like going from only spontaneous rooms to having planned rooms now planned clubs to spontaneous clubs maybe in a variety of other ways so I'm excited. Yeah, that's interesting. Totally. Okay club name question, actually, a couple relate to this, do you allow two clubs to have the same name. I've seen a couple of copycats pop up since the new inapt club feature itself launched.
Oh, okay, this is an interesting. If you, if you kind of zoom out a little bit and you think about clubhouse. One of the fundamental questions somebody asked in the early days is should we be named centric or user name centric. And if you think about all the other social platforms and people networks out there. They take different approaches, right, some are very username centric and some are very display name centric. We decided to be more display name centric because it's more human. And it in it in it mimics what you would experience in the real world. If you went to a party or a conference or an event that's why we display your first name only in the room. But then when you go to someone's profile. You can see their full name, and you can see their user name, if you need to disambiguate if you need to confirm that it's actually them, but but by default, we just display the first name, even though that's not unique right you might be in a room and there are two people named Nicole, but you can tap through and see which one it is. You can use the photo to disambiguate. So, so display names are how we typically work in clubhouse because it's just the. It just feels more human it feels more right for the for medium and for our product. Now, when we thought about club names, the question there is should club names have to be unique, right, like with people, the display name doesn't have to be unique, but the username does. And with clubs, we decided it should be similar. Then we went, you know we talked about this right like we could say well every club name has to be unique and there are benefits to that. But it seemed artificially limiting. And we, it seemed like you would encourage a lot of squatting right you can imagine people would rush out to try and get the most popular club names and then like sell them in a secondary market and felt like it would be unhealthy. And so what we decided to do instead was to say anyone like there is no uniqueness limitation on the display name of a club. But, but instead what we would do is we would we would rank clubs in terms of when you search, when you browse, we would rank them, and we would try and find the one that you are referring to. And so that way you sort of have to earn your prominence. And over time, it would be personalized to you so think about like LinkedIn or Facebook. It's kind of similar right you type in the name of a person. And many people have the same name. But then you can they try and show you the one that they think that you're looking for. Right, like, like it as the first result in the search, and then you can tap through and you can make sure it's the one that you're looking for and it might be information like how many connections or friends you have in common with that person and what their profile photo is and and you know where they went to school and and like there might be a bunch of other information there to help you know Yep, this is the specific one that I was looking for. And similarly, if you just search by topic and you found a list of clubs and a bunch of them have the same name. You can decide which one you want to be a part of based on other metadata we give you about that like how many members, it has and how frequently they host rooms and which of the people you follow are already members of that club and, and, and other information like that. And so, so I like that dynamic, because you have to you have to, you sort of have to earn provenance and ranking and it's going to be personalized to you, and it, it makes it so that there's not an incentive to land grab on names. And so that's one thing I should say and then the other thing is, we, we realized that there could be issues in the near term with people, creating names that are similarly confusing to other clubs, I think at some situations it's probably not problematic if two clubs have similar names and they're, you know, they're very different in other ways. If anyone is trying to impersonate a club, then that's not good and potentially confuse people that's not good. So we're adding something to the terms of service and community guidelines to make that to make it clear that that is not okay. And that's against the community guidelines, and we're gonna learn a lot about this stuff and we're gonna evolve it based on your feedback steps already been getting a ton of really useful feedback from from people in the community so that's sort of where we are with it today, and how we're thinking about it. And then, Anu Rojas, is there anything you would add to that, with regards to like club names and whether they need to be unique and how we think about that.
Right now we're just having discussion around.
Sorry. Yeah, I had to unmute. Yes, we actually right now started with imposing some unique checks on club names but we suspect that we're going to relax that over time and it was for the reason that Paul you mentioned was folks who was trying to squat names and grab brand names and things like that. So, please, please disregard everything that I was trying to figure out, should I correct him right now or should I just let him go. Oh, so we did we do have that for the, for right now we do, we do but it's, we don't actually I think like I agree with what you said, and I think we had initially added that but we want to remove that over time. Got it, okay well I'm going with the long term answer so I guess that we do technically prevent you but I think what people could, you know, I think, even if we did that there would be very, there could be confusingly similar names right where people add an article or like a, you know, plural versus singular are different characters like ASCII characters and things. So, I think we'll remove that. And then also, I think philosophically, rather than play whack a mole and try and prevent people from doing that I think this idea of, of, you know, making it so that there's a lot to help you understand which is the club that you're trying to find and which of the clubs unless you should join, regardless of whether they're similar or the same or confusingly similar.
Yeah, and I think in the same way that we do like a real identity, we have a real identity policy for users like we should have that for clubs too and it's like its authenticity and not impersonating other clubs which we should enforce.
I'm sorry for not knowing that we have that checked and
this just shows that we actually have debates on which way we should go on things.
The diversity question right because there are four ways to go, go at it. Yeah. All right, all right, all right, what's the next question that I want.
This next question is kind of related, I'm going to turn off slack noises around brand club accounts so a user wrote in, now that anyone can create a club directly How will you protect brands from having their names used by someone else, can you think about ways to indicate the clubs or the, quote, original or official account for a brand orange.
Oh yeah. So, this is. That's probably what your slack message. Yeah, this is a very important point actually so. So right now we like to think about with people we don't have like a blue checkmark program and the reason we don't do that is because blue checkmarks are kind of a silly thing they mean they mean two different things right they mean this person is who they actually say they are, but they also tend to mean this person is was important enough for us to spend time verifying so we are you know it's a status thing that you have on other networks, and we don't have that right now because we think that we think that by allowing people to link to their Instagram or their Twitter or other services like that. You can you can get the real identity verification just by, by, sort of, you know, allowing people to do that. And then the, the idea that this person is blessed or this person is a good creator we. I do think that there's room for editorial for us to try and have sort of like, you know, here are some, here's some curated sets of rooms that we think you might like. But, but but I think really what we want is for that stuff to be algorithmic and automated so that anyone with zero following can rise and become a creator, that's hosting great conversations and, and, and gain a lot of visibility and a big following. So, we haven't needed to do any sort of verification program yet. On the club from with brand sensor, that's a, it's a different angle on it and I think it's a really important one. So we've had a bunch of amazing brands setting up clubs, and we're excited about that right it's it's because they're hosting great conversations we're bringing on great guests I think it's additive to the experience for everyone. And what we want to do is make sure that we have a way of saying yep this actually is the NBA or this actually is Instagram or this actually is this brand hosting hosting club. And so, we're thinking about the right way to do that in the product today. But in the meantime, it is against the terms of service to do that. And if you ever see anyone with a club that impersonates a brand, or if you suspect it from being false like please please please report it and we will take action on it very quickly.
All right. Well this is still about clubs, but it's getting a little bit more into ranking and discovery. So, how do you rank clubs and the topic directory, my club used to be listed at the top and it's not now or doesn't seem to be. I don't see why. I don't know why, see some of them at the top. And I want some more information on clubs to decide what I would choose to follow or join as well.
Oh yeah, totally so club ranking is. It's pretty basic right now. And this is another one of those ones where you can expect it to constantly evolve and constantly be getting better and to get more and more personalized to you over time. So, it's also one of those things where we don't want to say exactly how ranking works because that'll allow people to gain ranking systems. But, but I'll tell you some things that I think should factor into club ranking over time, when we talk about it as a team. So, obviously things like the name of the club is the club tagged with one of these topics like have they said this is for people who like x. Do people who like topic x tend to follow this club is this club active like are they hosting conversations. How many have they hosted recently. What has been the retention rate when they host conversations when people come in, do they tend to stay or do they tend to leave. Do people that that are, that you follow tend to follow this club to people who are ranked highly in this topic tend to follow this club. Like in the future, you can imagine, we'll have. We'll have, you know, maybe other forms of like feedback that let that let us understand how, how much people enjoy conversations hosted by this club. So it's a lot of stuff like that. And our goal would be if you're trying to find a specific club, we show you the one and only one club that you're looking for. And if you're just interested in a topic and you're browsing by topic. We take anything you've chosen to tell us about yourself. You know like who you follow and what topics you're interested in and what other clubs that you you enjoy. And then we show you the clubs that we think you would enjoy most based on that topic so it's, you know, nothing crazy insightful there but, but really it's like all ranking systems, it's a combination of many factors. It should increasingly get better and better and better and more and more personalized to you, and the algorithms are always going to change. And they're intentionally not completely transparent and spelled out because we don't want people to be able to gain them, because that would lead to worse rankings for you.
Okay. And this last one, which I actually love that it's related to clubs, when Scott events, it'd be really helpful if we can create repeating rooms with our club for an event series, we can do them manually but they're not connected to each other, as well as to I suppose the clip.
Oh yeah. So recurring ribs yet totally okay so the way that I think about a club is a club is a conversation series, and it's really important that it is tied to that because if you don't have the conversation series and clubhouse What is your club for it's not very useful club it's just the grouping of user usernames right. And so, totally agree, like we should be communicating that and gearing the product towards that the only reason we didn't have occurred events in the early days, was it was getting a little bit into the, into the weeds, but the database of events, was not tied to rooms. So if you put something in the calendar back in the day. And then, it was really just kind of like a heads up, I intend to start a room at 10am on Saturday. And then when you went started room at 10am on Saturday. It was not tied to that event listing in any way, the database. And so, so we were we didn't want is for someone to go create a bunch of recurring events, even if they were well intentioned they're like yeah I'm gonna host this club every day or every week and then it's like joining a gym at the beginning of a new year like it just doesn't happen. We didn't want the calendar to be littered with all of these sort of like zombie events for people that had good intentions and then didn't end up hosting them back and we could actually know someone was putting a recurring event in the calendar and didn't actually start the event. And so we have the ability to do it right now. And I think we're going to do that because it should be easier to do that. And the one thing I would say like is. In the meantime, the nice thing about not having recurrent events, is that the people that tend to put them in there every day or every week tend to be the most motivated people. And that leads to calendar, being filled with the highest quality conversations from the most motivated hosts. But we do want to add this. We do want to add this in there, and then also having a concept of, you know, past events future events from a club that makes a ton of sense to, because it really is for a lot of people like a conversation series. And when that's another thing that should help you decide whether you want to follow a club right or join a club it's like, well do they host good events. Let me see. So, 100%, that makes a ton of sense and that's just a little bit of the inside baseball like why we haven't done it yet.
Okay. That wraps up our clip questions, which I'm actually really glad we had a ton of today in concert with the nap. So we do have about 12 other questions that I think would be great to get to based on what's been talked about a lot in the community, and we have less than 24 minutes. So I figured we should try to do some of these rapid fire. I get your head. It is very direct. Okay, I'm gonna shoot through some discovery questions one on follow up suggestions. Great, how do you how do you determine false suggestions based on topics versus location or language, versus shared network, and how can we as users give feedback on policy suggestions.
Okay, so follow suggestions, they're kind of two different types of file suggestions, what is the file suggestions that you encounter. Okay, I'll ignore the ones you get during onboarding, but the ones that you encounter in the app. And the ones that you encounter in the topic directory. So the ones that you encounter in the app are okay well there there's actually more than that, I guess when you follow someone, and you'll see you see a list of other people that you might want to follow up here it's a little row that pops up right below the Follow button. You can also get to that by the way if anyone doesn't know if you tap the little sparkle button to the right of the Follow button, without following someone without unfollowing someone you can see the suggestions anytime just by tapping on the little sparkle button. And those are those are intended to be like, Oh, if you like following this person you also might enjoy following this person. And those have gotten better and better. Those are I find those really useful. Sometimes if we don't have enough data on the person like if it's just a new user. We haven't computed that yet. Then, we'll just backfill it with generic false suggestions for you. And that's how those work, the generic follow suggestions are really based on. It's based on who you follow right it's based on other people that you've chosen to follow if you like following all the people that you currently follow you might also enjoy following these people, and they change all the time as new people join. And as we sort of precompute those things that topic based suggestions are again like like all the algorithms stuff they're going to be constantly changing and hopefully getting better and better and better. But they are, they are you know people who say they're interested in this topic, tend to disproportionately follow this person and you know they're there, they're far from perfect, but hopefully they'll keep getting better, and then language and location. We are increasingly incorporated that because we, you know, we've been growing really quickly in other countries, and I think it's been, you know, a lot of people who speak a different non English language as their first language have beginning follow suggestions for English speakers. And that's not great. And so we're trying to make those more personalized by location.
Okay, feature suggestion, I think a good one. I would love a quote history section added to the app, maybe two notifications. I'd love to be able to see or remember the rooms that I joined today, for example.
I think that's very interesting. Now the reason you can't scroll infinitely back in your notifications is just for you know just for performance reasons it makes it faster if we don't have infinite pagination, but
I think we've talked about history though in various ways a lot.
Yes, exactly. Yeah, so, so that's that's really like with regards to notifications the rooms that you joined also very interesting. And there are a couple different use cases I can imagine for that one would be to go find people that you enjoyed talking with, but might not have followed in the moment, it might be just for like, you know, memory capture you just want to remember it because it was like, it's fun to look back on all the great conversations that you have. It might be because you want to go start a room with those people again. There's a lot that goes into that and they're like privacy considerations too, because it hasn't been the norm. To date, but I think that's a very very rich area that I think is really cool, and I would love to have some more cycles to play with that so like the way we, the way we're prioritizing stuff right now is, we kind of think about four different buckets. In no particular order. One is welcoming more people to the app through things like Android and localization and, and even like creative monetization because that gives great creators reason to come on and bring their audience. The second one is just kind of keeping the wheels on as we grow through things like performance and and life scaling support trust and safety. The third one is discovery, which is a really really important one that's very top of mind for us right now because as you grow quickly like discovery can suffer if you don't have the right systems in place there. So we're really working on helping you find the right people to follow the right ribs in your feed the right notification algorithms. And then the last one is the in room experience to make sure that we have all the right moderator tools. And so, the history stuff. It's one of those ones where I'm like wow that was so cool spend cycles on that, but it hasn't risen to the level of like the single most important thing we need to focus on this week because there's a lot of like really really pressing stuff, and the app works without the history, even though it'd be a lot cooler when we have something like that.
Okay, fine. What about language support, will there be any way to translate the town hall or do the user orientation live into other languages,
they're loved this there are apparently
a lot of community folks from many countries, doing these separate rooms, post townhall I've seen a few
international stuff is so top of mind right now so like I love this so what people are doing is they're creating international English rooms for Town Hall, one person will be listening to us talking, and then they will give a translated version to people who, you know, speak a different language primarily, and I love that like that's amazing. So the question is, How do you translate it to other languages, honestly, I'd love to do it that way. I'd love to scale through the user community, because I think it'll be better. And I think it'll just be more scalable and, and, you know, good for everyone if there are people that are sufficiently motivated and want to do that and provide that service for their, their community. That would be absolutely incredible. So like, I think that people can do it without our permission. But, well, I guess I would say if people want to directly translate townhall into other languages. I'm excited about that. And they have my permission as a speaker to do that awkward mess. And I think, I think that system can scale. And so I just hope to like talk with more people who are thinking about doing that and see what they need from us, because it's such a shame that things like new user orientation, which would be another great one. And, and Town Hall are only in English right now, I'd love to find ways to work with the community to scale that.
Alright, I'm gonna do a few quick questions around creators and monetization. Okay and written trust and safety. First question around moderators. The user wrote in sorry if this question isn't for Town Hall. I'm new and want to know what are some common mistakes that a moderator can make. I figured we could take this one that I feel like it's a good one.
Oh yeah, that's a great one. So I talked through these in detail and user. So do use your reputation. We do it through us do it every Wednesday at six o'clock pacific time, and we go through all this stuff in detail, we prioritize questions from all the new people with the new batches this week, but it's open to everyone so if you ever want to have one of these things it's, it goes an hour and a half. About 45 minutes of overview than about 45 minutes of q&a, and we talked through all this stuff in detail but let me hit the high points on moderation. One is one mistake is not telling anyone about your show, so make sure you put it in the calendar grab the link posted anywhere where you have friends where you have an audience, tell people about it. If it's coming up and just generally like let people know that it's happening. The second thing is i think that i think that more people on stage is generally good, as long as you're thoughtful that we bring up like more people and see just generally good, this was surprising to us like we thought it would be three four or five speakers in most rooms, but they're incredible rooms that have 3040 like 30 speakers which is insane. Right, but it works. And I always say like, it's you know how people talk about Wikipedia as being something that works only in practice, not in theory like it's shitting work but somehow it works. And there are a bunch of reasons for that. But having to be more participatory is a really cool thing. And like the failure state I think sometimes for shows is when it feels like a live podcast where it feels like this sterile conversation between two people. And, like if you do that sometimes it can just feel like a worse version of podcasts, which isn't good so think about how you can make it participatory. Another mistake is like be thoughtful about who you bring up some people assume that the most. The best hosts are the ones who are most permissive and just relaxed and they let everyone come up and ask every question. I don't think that's actually the case, I think, like, a lot of times the best hosts are the ones who have a strong opinion, and they're really thoughtful about how they're curating the stage, and who they bring up and who they don't bring up they kind of look at people's profiles before they decide to call them up. And they really manage that well. Another mistake is making everyone a moderator, like, sometimes people do that is like a sign of respect I think that's, I think that makes for a worse room. If you make someone that you don't really trust you don't really know a moderator, they can bring anyone up they can move anyone off, they can, they can kick you out of your own room they can end your room. So that's, that's a, that's another thing that I would encourage people to, to be kind of judicious about and. And I don't know the last thing it's not really something people do wrong but I would just encourage people to develop their own style like people are following you because they like the way you do it, they like the fact you know that it's that it, like they always know that they follow you. It's like a nice fireside chat and it's, it's like really thoughtful and it's a great conversation and if they follow this other person they follow that because it's always a party, and it's fun and participatory and people are irreverent and, and they want you, because of who you are so, so don't try and just do what other people do try and develop your own style. And I'll stop there even though I could talk more about it but come Wednesday thank God because if you want to hear more thoughts on all this stuff.
This is just a plug for new user orientations important question. When are you going to launch the creator grant program, and who would be eligible to apply.
Oh yeah, we've been talking about this a lot over the past week or two. We're just trying to figure out the details of, of how it should work. And we were hoping to have more details on it today. But then we got a bunch of really great feedback and more thoughts on it so we're. We are reworking some stuff. So, I don't know yet but hopefully we'll have more details on it. Next week, But I don't want commit step to that because
it everyone will be. I think everyone will be eligible to apply but I don't know what the acceptance criteria will be
alright. More information to come on that monetization. Whenever you whenever users asked, Can I accept payment to moderate a room. Or for example to quote rent, my room to a brand or an event. And are you planning to make these monetization opportunities, built into the app itself.
I am excited to support stuff like this. And the reason why is because I think that it is pro creator, I think it's good for the Creator, and it's good for the community. If this is done well. And there's so many amazing funny smart thoughtful people who are great at hosting conversations and bringing people together, and we want them to be able to get paid directly for the amazing experiences that they're creating that we want that to be the foundation for our business model. And for clubhouse as a company, so that we are only growing when creators are growing and. And I think brands can play a great role in that right i think that if they want to hire someone to who's really great at moderating a moderator room or to bring a conversation together. I think they should be allowed to do that so. So we're, we're working on. Like right now. We're working on ways to help to help people find each other and to support that sort of thing, because we really really want everything that we do to be creative first and creator driven and again like anyone can become a creator, it just means you host conversations right and we want to make sure that that you've got a really that you've got a way to do that and make a living doing that. So, yeah, look for more of that I'm really excited about that.
Okay. And last question. In this session, when is it planned to open a public clubhouse API access for third party developers.
I don't think we have a, you know, definitive plans for that we talked about it internally we're like, wow, this would be so cool. And the, the ecosystem of third party apps that have been built around clubhouse it's like, amazing to us. It's so cool like you look at all of these tools that people are doing to, to help people like find people in clubs to follow and host better events and do all sorts of these things it's like it just like blows our mind we like share them in slack all the time. The one thing I would say though is there are times where we are unable to support certain applications, because, because it could put your account at risk right like if there are untrusted developers are there people doing things that that we think could be could be risky to end users. There are times where we can't support those things but like philosophically what we would love to have is a public API, where people could build all sorts of things on top of clubhouse. But we don't have definite timing on that just frankly like there's so many. There's so many other things that we need to build right now and we're growing the team quickly. And if anyone is interested in helping us build stuff like this please go to join clubhouse calm is full of the jobs tab at the bottom and let us know. But we don't have any time you're not any sort of API right now.
Okay, a few trust and safety questions I know we're thinking about a lot of that stuff this week on product to the next week. So one question around our policies, what types of violations get you removed entirely from the app. Could you publish this information somewhere.
Yeah. So a couple things that can result in permanent suspension one is verified intentional trolling, so if you ever come up and intentionally disrupt a stage, we have a one strike policy for that so we'll investigate it, and if you're found to have done it you're permanently removed from class. Another one I think is hate speech with clear mal intent gets you permanently removed for clubhouse multiple violations and suspensions can also add up to permanent removal. And the guidelines change as we encounter new situations like this should these policies should be living documents we should constantly be learning and constantly seeing new ways that people are using or misusing things, and and just refining that over time. So, so, so that's kind of. That's kind of where it is right now but it's going to change and and everything that we do here like it's. We're always very grateful people want to join clubs, but we just want to make sure that we're prioritizing the experiences of the many over the few and. And so, like, like trust and safety moderation it's, it's something that you just always have to make a priority. You always have to do it and you always have to just try and stay a step ahead of things, and realize that your job will never be done, and that every policy every document every internal tool has to get better and better and better every week. If you're building for everyone right because like I was saying before, there are bad actors in the world and. And you have to build a product that's robust to that.
Okay, next question is around real identity. I've started to see more accounts pretending to be celebrities. And since these celebrities may not join rooms very often it's hard to tell which account is real. Would there be a way to use audience feedback to confirm identity for example if a celebrity talks in a room and everyone agrees it's really them. You could tap a Verify button. I think, you know, first part is a good question and then there's one suggestion. Yeah.
So the way there are kind of two ways it works. Yeah, sorry if someone has seen that I haven't noticed that but like that's, that's really good feedback to hear we will take a deeper look at that the, the way people tend to verify that they are who they say they are is by linking their, their Instagram or their Twitter. And, you know, maybe that will evolve going forward, if there are better ways for us to do that. The way that people report. Someone who is impersonating someone is they go to their profile, they tap the three dots and they report violation. And there's a specific thing that you can say that this is someone is impersonating someone, and we take quick action on that and we, we, we, you know, if we believe that it's someone impersonating someone we remove them from service, and we take that really really seriously so the way we do today is we allow them to verify they are who they say they are by authentic to their account, we allow anyone to report that they are not who they say they are but we don't have as a way for other people to say they are who they say they are, because I think that can be subject to some abuse and so that's how we're today, and, and, and I expect that to evolve over time, if you ever see someone and you think it's not you think they're impersonating Someone please please please report it because it would make clubhouse better for everybody.
Okay. What is your stance on free advice and millionaire secrets rooms. There's, there's been some rooms discussing if these types of rooms should be allowed because they might expose users to financial risks, or scams.
Oh boy, what is my stance. So, we, we, we review reports on these types of rooms. Very carefully, and we agree that misinformation related to financial decisions can be very harmful so the way that like that, the challenge that we think about is how do you distinguish between something that is genuinely a you know a discussion about financial planning and things like that. And something that that crosses the line. And in today. We have guidelines against any sort of financial scams. You're allowed to have advice rooms or planning rooms, they don't violate existing rules, but the user feedback is really really helpful thing that I would say is, we're, we're working on, we're actively working on ways to distinguish between good content. And, you know, lower quality content and content that actually violates the rule. Part of the part of the, the, the good and the back of this group structure that clubhouse has is that there are a lot of edges for discovery, like if someone that you follow is in a room. You might see that room and your feed. Even if you don't follow the speaker and that creates all these moments for serendip. At a room that you don't really care about appears in your feet over and over again. And so, and so there are a couple things that we're working on one is a way for you to understand why we're seeing a room, and for you to unfollow the person to cause you to see the room, if, if you don't enjoy that room. And the second thing is working on ways to make sure that your default feed shows you rooms that we think you would like, rather than rooms that we are not confident you would like because, you know, again there are 1000s and 1000s of rooms going on all over the world in clubhouse. Our job is really to show you the handful of rooms that we think you would like best. And that should be based on, like, who you follow, who you block. Maybe who your followers have blocked. Maybe reports from other users about these rooms. So, hopefully what you'll find is over the coming weeks, you will see more and more rooms in your sheet that you think are good rooms, and any room that you feel is low quality or spammy you won't see it in your feed, unless you follow those people. So I appreciate the question it's a really really important one and discoveries so top of mind for us right now.
And I think we said at the top two they were, give, give folks an option to tell us why they don't want to see your room in their feed if they are seeing it soon as well. That's right, that's right. Yeah. I think that'll be great. Okay, quick, quick, remaining trust and safety question and then I have one more. Right after that that came in. Okay. Okay. Why can I see quote report for trolling only on some speaker profiles, when I tap them.
Okay, so if you're ever on stage, and someone is intentionally trying to disrupt the stage. And I think we're changing the language on that report for trolling to report for disrupting the stage I think because trolling is a bit of a vague term, but anytime someone is, you see that happening, you can tap and hold. And you can immediately report them from disrupting the stage, you know, remove them from the stage remove them from the room report it and give you an option to block them. So it's really really fast like if you're a moderator just know tap and hold and then you can report someone. What we find though is sometimes. New speakers, people are new to hosting rooms, they might not know that shortcut because it's not particularly discoverable. And so, somewhere if someone were to come up and this is very rare but if it happens, it has such a negative impact we really want to make sure that the product is robust to it. If someone were to disrupt the stage, they would tap on their profile and look for what to do. And it's it's a stressful moment if that ever happens right so you need to make it really easy for them. So we have a button that appears on the profile half sheet for people that we think might be high risk for for disrupting the status and that's really like newer accounts once where there hasn't been trust built in. So, people that we think you know if anyone is going to disrupt the stage like they're probably statistically more likely than, then an account that's been around for a long time and has built a lot of reputation and trust, and so on those ones that feel high risk there's a button on the hash sheet that says report for trolling to make it really fast and accessible, you can always do it by tapping and holding. But we make it more accessible for ones that we feel are higher risk. And that's another thing that will evolve over time but that that's how we do it right now. And we didn't want to put on everyone's profile because it's, it's like a lot of real estate and it's kind of a strange thing to see if it's like a friend you've been following for a long time, but for the higher risk once we put it there.
Alright, are you ready for the last slide ready.
I don't want to
bring it home.
If you were a user that just joined clubhouse this week, what would you do there seem to be a lot of prominent users and creators already. Should we be doing something different than the first users who might have joined a while ago.
Hmm. Well, that's what you want to do. Are you looking like like. It's really interesting like if you think about the spectrum of communication, like on one end, you have broadcast media right these are people who are like trying to build an audience and a following and, you know, grow that over time. And then on the other end of the spectrum you have private communication, like a two person private room. And on clubhouse you can do either of those, but you can also do everything in the middle which I actually think is the most interesting part like for broadcast communication you have podcasts for private conversations your phone calls, but that middle ground where you have all of these rooms filled with 20 people 50 people 1000 people, friends of friends, people in your extended network just one hop away who are trusted but new to you, where you can meet and talk through all of these things and connect with them and develop relationships and, and, and, you know, come together as humans like that's that's the part that I think is actually most interesting, but, you know, so So how should you use clubhouse you can use it anywhere along that spectrum. Right. You can use it to catch up with friends and just see who's online and chat with them. You can use it for that middle ground where you're, you're having these sort of social rooms and, and like semi private conversations with with people and growing, growing your set of friendships and, you know, learning, or you can use it to host a show, and really be a creator and gain an audience, and I think that this question is probably focused on that last category so I'll focus in on that, I would say for everyone who's new to club so I really say come to orientation Wednesday six o'clock Pacific because we go through everything we talked about how to tune who you follow and tune your notifications and fill out a nice profile and in the do's and don'ts. So come to orientations person and say, and then the second thing I'd say is, for that last bucket if you really want to focus on building an audience and hosting conversations a few things. One is, it's, it is. We believe it's really early in the life of clubhouse. and. And it's such a nervous point really quickly and I think there are plenty of opportunities to build a following so don't be worried about being late to the game. It's not pay to the game it's early. The second thing I'd say is start a club. Now, people can follow you as a person, but if you really want to host recurring events that started club, give it a, give it a brand give it a name. Give it, give it a nice description and a nice photos people know what it's all about tag it with a few topics so people know what topics you tend to cover. Make sure you add your events to the calendar and picking a regular time is good, so that people can I know, like every Thursday at six I come in I listen to this or every night at 10 o'clock I Pacific I listen to a good time, or, or, you know, having an irregular is really good because if it happens at all random different times. It's. People will people will still come they'll get notified but they won't be able to like mentally know that it always happens at that time we really look forward to it. I think that, you know, there's so much opportunity right now with with like daily shows like daily morning news shows evening news shows. If you think about everything that happens on radio, television, there are these repeat things where you can build a relationship with the host. And you could just naturally talk about the headlines of the day, and the news that's happening. And you can you can build that relationship with people so I continue to believe like there's a ton of opportunity to, to create this regular recurring relationship with people, by hosting these shows at the same time every morning or every evening or during the day. Bring on interesting guests like like clubhouse is a group experience and and a lot of times people reach out to people randomly they like cold email people or ping them on, on Twitter or Instagram and they invite them to like famous authors and academics and musicians will say yeah that sounds great and they'll come on, you'd be surprised how receptive people are so, so bring on interesting guests, bring people from different worlds together like a lot of the most interesting conversations come with people who have mutual admiration for each other, but they come from really different industries or really different worlds those can be some of the most special moments that you see in a clubhouse bring people with different perspectives. Some of the most exciting rooms are like, if it's just a room of everyone like agreeing with each other, that, that can that can be kind of boring sometimes you want people that disagree that like, bring different perspectives that can debate the pros and cons and and can have a passionate conversation, and really expose you to different perspectives, I think, talking about topical things things that are in the news things that are the Zeitgeist things are happening today like one of the amazing things about clubhouse is when something happens in the world.
Here, not to break the news but to talk about it, to digest the news to process the news together, like the example we were talking about, you know, a while back, like when RPG died. I was in a room like this talking and I saw the little green notification coming from the top. That said some someone started room titled RPG and someone started, someone else's room title oh no RPG, but someone else title a new room saying, like, oh god RPG, you know and and everyone in the room suddenly had this realization that something that something terrible had happened, and you go into the hallway. And it was just filled with rooms with people coming together and talk about her and some people were talking about the political implications for the Supreme. We're, we're like sharing stories of her childhood and some people were singing a vigil together and it was just incredibly powerful they're, you know, they're remember remember it's rooms and tribute rooms and all these things happen. Every time there's breaking news so so when things happen in the world. People want to come together and talk about them. So, so talking about things that are topical that are happening right now that's that's always powerful thing. Bringing guests that have an established following can really help to like jumpstart a room like if someone with a large following raises their hand or comes in us that can bring 1000s of people into the room who could then follow your club and and kind of form the seed of your community. So that's why I'd say like, like, bring on interesting guests like hosts post good content that people are interested in talking about let people know about it. So you added to the calendar you grab the link posted places they get participatory. Now, like, one of the things that I think has been so cool is to see all these all these formats that are really participatory and really native to clubhouse take shape, I was talking with Andrew Lee about news news news which is his club where they talk. Every morning, and he brings up these guests and someone will throw out a topic that's in the news today, and they'll spend five minutes, exactly talking about that topic, then they'll move on to the next one. And, and all of the people that are coming up and asking questions are journalists which is amazing, journalists from all over the world, who, who are, who are thinking about this stuff all the time they'll throw out a topic from some totally different domains and totally different area and the whole group will talk about it. And it's, it's like nothing you would ever see on a podcast or on the radio or anywhere else, like it's such a native format, and it's awesome. It's awesome. And every time a new person comes up their followers get notified that the, that they're talking and so brings more people and more energy to the room it's totally native or you look at like what NYU girls have done in a really short period of time they built this huge following. And they bring people up to like roast them and just to like, hear their story and to be funny. And it's really participatory it's really native to the medium or like Cotton Club was one of the originators of this they bring everyone up on stage and everyone would change their profile photo to black and white photo of famous like jazz musician. And it was really participatory and it's this incredible experience and all these things are totally native so I think, trying to think of new formats that that field data have to take advantage of the things that you can do with live group audio and clubhouse that you just couldn't do elsewhere. A couple other things I know we're over time, but using the audience to line up guests so like I remember like bear today was I was hosting a room one time, and he was taking questions and I asked who's someone that you'd love to have on your next show, and he's like oh that's a great question. You know, I've always wanted to talk with and he named a couple people, and the first person he named someone in the audience raises their hand and says, I know her. I'll shoot you an email and I'll introduce you right now. And I'd love to see more people do this like use the audience to say I want to do a show next week or tomorrow about this. If you know someone who is in. If you know this specific person or somebody works at this company or somebody worked on this campaign or somebody who's an expert in this topic, please connect us like here's how you do that, like people should use the power of the people in the room more often to do that. Let's see. And I guess the last thing I'd say is if you want to get started just use the app, like the room structure is so powerful. If you come into rooms and, you know, people will notice you they'll follow you if you raise your hand and ask a question, people will notice you, they'll follow you if you host conversations if you take part in conversations, you'll just organically gain followers, which I think is a wonderful thing like discovery just happens really naturally a clubhouse and as you do that you'll also find people who host their own clubs who have their own shows who want to collaborate with you because collaboration is a really big part of the culture here. If you want more details, there's a hosting conversations guide in the Knowledge Center if you go to support dot join clubhouse.com there's a section or hosting conversations that has some one more tactical stuff. But I love this question and those are some of the tips that I would give off the off the top of my head.
I don't want to know what it's like if you had preparation.
I do think about class a lot. All right, we're 12 minutes over I'm sorry we try and keep it to an hour we always go a little bit over this is more so than normal. But these are wonderful questions, and thank you so so so so so much everyone for, for being here for being part of this, this, this community. I say this every week and I'm never gonna I'm never going to stop saying this. I mean, clubhouse it's it's intended to be a blank canvas filled with amazing people from around the world from all different verticals all different domains. And that's, that's what that's like. The only thing the app is about. It's about people, and it would be nothing without all of you it's everything with all of you. And it just blows my mind every week, every day, every night that we get to spend our time working on this product. And it is never lost on us for a second how fortunate we are. So, if you have any questions that we didn't get to please come to orientation or shoot us a note, if you, if you go to support dot two and clubhouse.com. That's the Knowledge Center to get the answers to like, all your questions so we try to get all the most common ones we're constantly updating it. And, and there's a way to contact us, contact the whole team. If there's any question that you have that isn't answered right there or just ask people in rooms where rooms all the time in like we are here to help you. So much of what we build is based on the feedback that we get from you with these questions and rooms like this. And, and, like, and it's really, it's all we focus on night and day. And so thank you so much everyone for spending a little bit of your Sunday with us. If it's Sunday wherever you are right now. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. I hope to see many of you, Wednesday, six o'clock Pacific and your user orientation others Town Hall next week. It all of the amazing rooms that are happening in between a wonderful day. Thank you again for being here and hope to talk to everybody soon, everyone. Happy Sunday. I.