Clubhouse 12+

I absolutely love clubhouse, the only thing that I dislike is industry people charging others to speak on a free platform that was built to create the connection between the industry world with individuals who are somewhat already in the industry. I feel like clubhouse needs to keep the app invite only maybe doing 1 invite every two months to stop the app from being over saturated like Facebook or Instagram where anyone can join. I think they need to have someone go into these rooms and make sure all guidelines are being met because most of them are not. This shouldn’t be a popularity app, but a tool to help creative minds link with professionals and network. People should not be charged to enter a public room by people claiming to be professionals. Cashapp’s should not be allowed in profile descriptions on a public platform. And I feel like being that the app was create to be an open form raising of hands should not be disabled. Moderators should just pick who that want on stage but not make someone feel less then by disabling hands.

When I was first introduced to this app, I found it to be workable with my screen reader. I was able to find rooms to get into and topics to join. However, since they introduced replays, and clubs, and people I might know on clubhouse, it has been an extremely cumbersome user experience for me. I find it near impossible to scroll through all of the recommendations and constantly get stuck on screens I have no desire to get stuck on, such as the aforementioned. I wish there was a way to filter out past replays, people I might know, clubs I'm not interested in in the slightest, and such overblown things. Furthermore, there is no better way than to scroll and hope one gets past all of the sludge in hopes of finding a room where I might talk. As it stands, I find the entire process far more vexing than helpful and have rarely used the app within the past year or so. Given the auditory nature of the app, it would seem to be well-suited to those of us who have no need for video communication. However, the frustration of the interface far outweighs the usefulness of the platform in general. I wish I could put up a better review, but I would rather be honest about my experience than lie and say the thing was great and that I spend all my waking hours on it. Alas, I cannot and what you have here is a review fraught with annoyance and disappointment. What seemed to be an enlightening experience has turned into a painful one.

As with any social media desperate for something – whatever that may be – Clubhouse is continually adjusting things that users never asked for; such as: making the friend list a one-dimensional, horizontal scrollable list which only shows a view of ~4-5 users (on my device) at any time, akin to Instagram’s Stories UI. In the case of Instagram, it’s incredibly obnoxious and trashy. It’s worse in the case of Clubhouse, because the list – which requires unnecessary amounts of scrolling – involves friends online or recently active. This is directly counter to how the app functioned since inception (as far as this user is aware of). The “old” design of the online / recently active list allowed for the viewing of many more friends per ‘screen’ – much less scrolling involved to achieve trivial information such as the answer to, “who’s online and may be available to talk?”

An easy suggestion to the developers of Clubhouse is to *not* be inspired by examples from the dumpster, like Meta/Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google... Were the UI folks hired from a company like Meta? Is the excuse that this is “an experiment” ? I don’t know a single friend or person on CH that thinks the new UI change is any good. It’s not a “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” issue; it’s simply just terrible design. This is straightforward.