China’s State Internet Information Office and Ministry of Public Security recently interviewed 11 domestic Internet companies to conduct “security assessments” of applications similar to the U.S. voice-based social networking software Clubhouse and those involving “deep forgery” technology. According to Xinhua, the Communist Party’s official media, this is an early “red line” for new Internet technologies and applications in China.
Clubhouse, the instant audio social networking App that went live during the Epidemic, has taken the world by storm, drawing fans with its open-ended rooms and high-quality audio chats. Not surprisingly, after a brief stint in China, Clubhouse was banned by Chinese authorities in early February.
In terms of novelty, Clubhouse may not be able to effectively attract Chinese users, as China’s homegrown instant social media software has been available in the domestic market for a decade, but has been lukewarm.
Today you can still find Soul, Handy Claw, MiChat, Interact, Lychee and a host of other Chinese apps of a similar nature to Clubhouse on the shelves of China’s mobile app stores, some of which have been around since as early as 2011.
The Chinese authorities’ interview proves that Chinese Internet companies are seeking to take advantage of Clubhouse’s popularity by “frying” their own similar software or launching “new copycat products” to take advantage of Clubhouse’s recent expulsion from the Chinese market. The Chinese market has just been driven out of the residual heat to make a profit.
From text to audio to video, social media products, as a vehicle for cultural communication, have evolved into a tool for making money in the Chinese market with a strong commercial flavor and vulgar Culture.
Clubhouse, on the other hand, is pure in the sense that it was originally intended for social media software development, i.e. authenticity, communication and exchange, but this purity seems to be the reason why Chinese users are after it, which is saddening.
Clubhouse, a pure social media platform
Clubhouse, which is free to download and use, has become an Internet unicorn valued at over $1 billion in just 10 months, with “tickets” for users to join the software fetching hundreds of dollars.
Clubhouse’s boom directly drove the share price of Agora, the real-Time audio and video service provider behind it, up 40%, and even indirectly drove the share price of Li Zhi, a Chinese audio social platform that also uses the service of Sound.com, up 41.37%.
The immediate reason for Clubhouse’s short-lived popularity is clearly its free-speaking public chat mechanism, a pure platform of free sharing that can serve the right appetite for users of all ages.
Professor Jiang, a business professor at a Midwestern university, told Voice of America that what he felt most about Clubhouse as one of its first users was that it was a relaxed, free, and highly professional platform for pure communication.
He said, “From my personal experience, there are two things that attract me, the first is that I will pay more attention to some political and cultural exchange topics. The second thing that attracts me more is similar to the reason why Zhihu was hot years ago, the speakers inside Clubhouse, their professionalism is generally a little more professional than other social media users, and they can analyze issues from different perspectives and at different levels.”
At the same time, Professor Jiang believes that Clubhouse’s user interface is very simple, the way to enter the chat room is faster and more convenient than similar software in China, and the freedom to speak in the room is extremely high, so you can express your own opinions.
Jeremy, a software engineer on the U.S. West Coast, is also an early user of Clubhouse and has found rooms that interest him on the emerging social media.
He said, “(I’m) interested in the room to talk about entrepreneurship, for example, some successful entrepreneurs he speaks (experience), there are some people who are starting a business to ask questions, through this (room) can really learn a lot of things, but also to understand more directly, rather than through the online news, video or something, with face-to-face chat kind of feeling, directly hear their It’s still a good feeling to hear their conversations.”
But Jeremy, an engineer, also gave a more professional assessment of Clubhouse, saying that the software did not include a search and classification mechanism, and that he was frustrated by the inability to search directly for topics of interest.
He said: “At first, I was not used to it, I didn’t know how to use it, I didn’t know how to invite friends, and then I found out that the software is not very well done, not that it is very new, it has no function to search rooms and classify them, and some of its operations are not in line with the habits of some mainstream software, this should be one of its defects, to be honest, it is still a bit simple, if analyzed from the software side.”
Star with goods and hunger marketing
Elon Musk, the world’s top Internet streamer and CEO of tesla and SpaceX, tweeted on Feb. 1 that he would open a voice room at Clubhouse to communicate with Internet users.
With you “sit” in a room can also be Facebook Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg), Innovation Factory chairman and CEO Kai-Fu Lee, and so on.
It is said that the investor behind the Clubhouse is the Andreessen Horowitz Foundation, which is also Musk’s business partner, and that Sriram Krishnan, a partner of the foundation, was present in the Clubhouse discussion room with Musk on February 1.
The star-studded event made Clubhouse an overnight global social media phenomenon, but in addition to the celebrity lead, Clubhouse’s marketing strategy further ignited the curiosity of internet users.
“Got an invite code?” It became a new way to greet friends, as Clubhouse only allows invite-only access and each new user can only get two invitation codes, an invitation mechanism that adds another dry wood to the blazing fire.
Professor Jiang said: “First of all, based on the market perspective, I think Clubhouse has captured two points, the first is the celebrity effect, his fire originated from Elon Musk’s retweets and shares, as well as the subsequent use of some celebrities and sharing in (other) social media. The second reason is that in terms of marketing he used a hunger marketing approach, the way Clubhouse members sign up is through invitation-only sharing, so it creates a lot of curiosity-driven customers to drive them to Clubhouse.”
Jason, an international student in the U.S., is also one of the platform’s 2 million users, and he sees this mode of communication as being like being present at a seminar where he can chat face-to-face with his idols and industry bigwigs.
I think the first thing is that it provides a platform for people to talk about what they want, and they can create a room based on their own ideas, and then communicate with people from all over the world, and secondly, there are a lot of industry leaders who join these discussions, so it gives some ordinary people a chance to communicate with these leaders. “
Banned only because they are not allowed to speak freely?
On February 8, Chinese users who were already on Clubhouse received an “error” alert in the user interface, after which they were unable to access or display room content, and they were also unable to register as new users using their Chinese domestic cell phone numbers. Immediately afterwards, the word Clubhouse was blocked on major Chinese social media, with the official response being a suspected violation.
This meant that Clubhouse, the emerging social media software, ended its brief boom in the Chinese market, with the constant emergence of “three places on both sides of the Taiwan Strait,” “Xinjiang detention camp,” “Hong Kong anti-sending China ” and “June 4 incident” discussion room made the Chinese government feel the crisis, the authorities decided to kick it out of the wall, and now domestic users in China can only log in through a VPN wall.
Jason students share the thoughts of most domestic Chinese users, they believe that the fundamental reason for Clubhouse being blocked within China is that China has extremely strict control over freedom of speech in the country, and Clubhouse as foreign software the Chinese government does not have the ability to monitor it, so it is simply blocked outright .
He said, “I think the main reason is probably the Chinese government’s control of speech, because this software is not monitored by the Chinese government, there will be unfavorable comments to the Chinese government from the outside world to the domestic, and the domestic government does not want some of the domestic opposing speech to spread abroad, so I think this is why they put this software to A blocking.”
Professor Jiang believes that the authorities chose to block Clubhouse not only because users can freely discuss sensitive topics in China, but also because there are signs that the emerging social media software may threaten the Chinese domestic market and the interests of some companies.
I think the root cause is twofold. The first is that, politically speaking, Clubhouse is relatively free and discusses a relatively wide range of topics, so the Chinese government has imposed restrictions on Clubhouse as part of a preventive and control initiative for online media,” he said. The second point is that it affects the share of the Chinese social media market, because it is a unique software compared to the current situation of Chinese social media, and its mode of operation and capital model is very different from the existing Chinese voice chat software, such as YY, etc. Most of the social media in China are actually controlled by large capital groups or institutions, and (Clubhouse) has affected the existing The business model.”
A barren social media market? Or is it a barren, effective social media of high quality?
At present, cultural communication in China is traffic-oriented. In a rapidly developing economy, people are becoming tired of appreciating the elegance of text in favor of more direct voice and video, but the smoothness brought by the voice and video of cultural communication is also destined to come at the cost of loss of communication and exchange.
Clubhouse has seized the opportunity that people are aware of and want to return to, so instead of calling it an emerging Internet unicorn, we should see it as the return of cultural communication.
Some people say that the explosion of Clubhouse proves the barrenness of China’s social media market. Actually, no, what is barren in China’s domestic cultural communication is high-quality social and effective social.
Chinese social media Soul, launched in 2016, was sought after by more than 100 million users for its main focus on soulful social interaction, but is now reduced to a commercial tool for brainless amenity products and pornographic and vulgar communication.
The 2019 launch of social media software, which is very similar to Clubhouse, has been a refreshing stream of “originality”, but it is reported that the software has only been downloaded 140,000 times since its launch, which is a far cry from the nearly 4 million downloads of Clubhouse in a single week.
China’s social media is heavily commercialized, from developers to users, and the pandemonium of the social environment has made people forget that software can actually spread culture, and the authorities want social media to be more of a platform for entertainment than discussion, so they are going further and further down this road.
I think the Chinese government’s policy on the existing social media market is more oriented towards entertainment or a more livelihood-oriented direction than cultural or political communication, and the explosion of Clubhouse will, to some extent, have a certain impact on the existing social media market and improve the capital operation of the existing social media market. The Chinese social media market is still dominated by live streaming, bounties, and goods, which drive a series of capital chains, while a social media like Clubhouse is more based on the user’s independent interest and free discussion on a certain topic.”
Jason also said that some vulgar culture has become more prevalent in China in recent years, which has led to some Chinese social media gradually moving closer to vulgarity.
A psychologist once analyzed that the social drivers among strangers are hormone-driven, interest-driven, help-driven and loneliness-driven respectively.
China’s local social media software no longer wants to be a medium of cultural communication and exchange, but has become a carrier of vulgarity and brass, killing each other and giving Clubhouse a chance to “take advantage of it”, which is probably the reason why it is booming.
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