Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces are the Goldilocks zone of conversation – they're just right

Nandini YadavApr 01, 2021 09:32:16 ISTOne of biggest tech trends of 2021 was the skyrocketing popularity of the audio-only app Clubhouse. From 2,000 downloads in September 2020, the app’s monthly downloads jumped to 2.4 million in January 2021. In February 2021, Clubhouse crossed 10 million downloads globally on the Apple App Store. Unless you took social distancing a little too far and were living in a cave, you would know that Clubhouse is a social platform built around the “drop-in audio chat” model. It features ephemeral real-time voice conversations that any user can listen to and nobody can record. From Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah to Lindsay Lohan, Clubhouse has gathered a legion of high-profile users. What’s so attractive about audio-only conversation? For starters, the pandemic, the quarantine, the one-year of WFH, the hordes of people desperate for social connection, all of that together may have created the ideal conditions for the audio-only model to thrive. Stanford professor Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL) recently shared a study, according to which, ‘Zoom fatigue’ is real. Bailenson says these video calls are tiring people out more than usual. Constant Zoom calls and meetings, longer work…
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