People are right to be focusing attention on Clubhouse’s meteoric rise. But almost everyone seems to misunderstand what is making the app so successful.
It isn’t, as people like Ben Thompson suggest, simply another iteration of the old story of lowering the barriers for production and consumption, shortening feedback loops and creating new “white space” for aspiring stars. If you think of it as being like Twitter, Stories or TikTok, you are missing the point.
The key to Clubhouse’s rapid accession is that its social design makes it an ideal platform for cults at a time when the social internet is rapidly evolving away from organizing around communities and toward cults. Clubhouse’s rise likely signals major strategic shifts that several legacy social platforms are going to have to consider.
The weakening of digital communities and rise of digital cults that we are seeing is inevitable. A similar pattern played out millennia ago in the physical world, as large cults and autocracies came to dominate small local communities. It is reasonable that the same cycle would repeat at warp speed in the digital space.
But I wonder if the move from digital community to digital cult is the final stage in the internet’s development. And if it’s not, how can communities regain power in the future?
The Distinction Between Traditional Digital Communities and Modern Digital Cults
Communities are places where people value the viewpoints and stories of other group members and care about their standing in the minds of those others.
Cults, on the other hand, are places where people want to hear from a powerful leader and care about their standing in the eyes of the leader but not necessarily other cult members.
The early social internet’s community-based organizational structure solved many of the challenges of the web in its first days, such as a lack of content. The web initially didn’t have many users on it, so meeting new people via the social internet was a great experience. It was reasonably hard to discover new groups, so natural barriers and screens protected communities. Finally, while groups had moderators, no real world power or wealth resided in being a digital leader. In the idealistic state of the early web, most moderators stayed in the background, supporting their communities..
In today’s version of the internet, of course, all of these realities have seen a complete reversal.
Abundant content is available. Nearly everyone on earth has access. Search and social media functions have removed any barriers to discovery. And, of course, you can now garner real-world money and power as a digital leader.
This evolution has exerted crippling pressure on the historically flat forms of digital communities. Community message threads, for example, almost instantly become unwieldy. And there is so much power and money in digital leadership now that the incentive for moderators to step out of the shadows and assert their authority is nearly irresistible.
This evolution has also moved the digital world toward cult models, where people follow and listen to a single leader or influencer rather than participate in more-open communities. That’s a natural response for many followers: When it is impossible to keep up with a large community, and when so much of the content it produces is no longer high quality, following a high-quality leader is a rational move. When that leader amasses immense power, it’s logical to care about their viewpoints and look for validation from them.
The upshot is this: Communities and cults are both valid and reasonable ways to organize social structures. Flat communities worked well in the early internet of high barriers to participation and limited people and content. Hierarchical cults work better today, when the internet has a plethora of content and people, and all those barriers have fallen away.
The Key Features That Make Clubhouse the Ideal Cult Platform
Clubhouse is by no means the first platform that enables cults. It is just the best platform to date—and the most explicit about its purpose.
Before Clubhouse existed, Twitter created a proto-cult platform where aspiring cult leaders could build enormous audiences, disciples retweeted their messages, leaders blessed followers with public replies, and so forth. Instagram and TikTok have followed the Twitter model and minted new cult leaders and behaviors of their own.
But a few specific features of Clubhouse make it in my mind the most complete and compelling cult platform to date:
Every good cult leader needs a stage
Perhaps the most distinctive thing about the Clubhouse chat-room model is that it provides a stage where leaders can talk while followers listen as part of an audience—and sometimes wait to be called on.
This is nothing new in the physical social world, but it is revolutionary in the digital social world, where groups and shared messenger threads have historically always been communal spaces.
This design solves a social problem you see in messaging threads for large groups and in Discord chat rooms, which quickly devolve into incomprehensible cacophony. But it also quite starkly creates a hierarchy of the elect over the masses of passive listeners.
Those on the stage draw the crowd of listeners, set the tone and talking points of the conversation, and decide who gets to speak.
Cult leaders are their own moderators
In most traditional settings for digital social groups, the role of moderator and speaker are distinct.
A group administrator might set the topics and ground rules, and then invite a speaker to share thoughts, stories and so on within the framework of the moderator’s ground rules and the community’s standards.
Because Clubhouse builds ad-hoc groups and rooms specifically around speakers, there is no moderator role distinct from the leader’s. Moderator and speaker are one and the same.
Technically, of course, the community of listeners can flag extreme situations for platform review (and this does happen in Clubhouse). But since the audience on a platform such as Clubhouse is drawn into the space by following the leader-moderator, only a defecting disciple can put a check on the speaker.
This model makes for powerful and appealing speech. But combining the moderator and leader roles creates huge potential for the spread of misinformation, propaganda and other forms of extreme and scary content.
Cult leaders need mechanisms for elevating and blessing followers, as well as mutually reinforcing power
In most religions it is a big honor to be chosen to join the leaders on stage to address the gathered congregation.
Clubhouse captures this mechanic beautifully, allowing the assembled masses to raise their hands while the anointed leaders choose who gets to speak.
For those in the audience, the feeling that they might be chosen to address other followers is a powerful incentive for participation, especially since performing well can gain them a following of their own.
For the leaders, their power to elevate followers is a currency they can distribute. The power of this currency both drives engagement (giving out gifts builds affinity) and creates deference (gifts given can be taken away).
The same powerful currency works when cross-promoting with other cult leaders. Teaming up and exchanging reach and social capital as near peer’ is just as important a mechanism as blessing disciples.
Cults need appointment-based ritual and repetition
In the earliest days of Clubhouse, there wasn’t really any scheduling function. Conversations happened ad hoc based on the people entering the app, prompted by push notifications.
In the last few months the app has embraced an appointments feature, which allows you to schedule time daily or weekly for listening to your favorite “preachers” in a group ritual.
This seems like a smart move. Clubhouse is re-creating something that is new in digital space but centuries old in the physical world.
Strong cults are based on ritual and repetition. You need to hear from the same leaders and say the same prayers or mantras over and over to stay engaged. The more you do those things, the deeper your allegiance grows.
As Clubhouse innovates in appointment-based, consistently repeated social media, it is adopting some of the most powerful patterns of cults in the real world.
Cults need a strong core of true believers, not just casual listeners
Clubhouse has done a great job so far of leveraging Twitter as a proto-cult to make sure the people that follow someone on Clubhouse are authentic fans. This creates safety for the cult leader and means they are instantly facing a core fan base that already likes them and is on their side.
By way of contrast, consider how other platforms have done this before. Eons ago, Facebook wanted to compete with Twitter for a public follower graph. To do so, it added a mechanism where you could follow a person’s public posts. Facebook then did what it generally does best—getting people as many followers as it could, as quickly as possible.
The effort basically failed. The growth efforts that Facebook undertook effectively prioritized who was going to click to follow over who actually cared about the subject. For instance, I ended up with hundreds of thousands of Indonesian followers who didn’t care what I said but made strange comments.
Twitter in the early days had a similar (if less substantial) problem. Many of the people it suggested to new users as worthy of following ended up with hundreds of thousands (or millions) of followers who didn’t know them or didn’t particularly like them. Many of those people have just stopped tweeting at this point, because they get so much hate and FUD from those inauthentic followers whenever they post.
The upshot is that for great cults, large audiences are powerful, but only if they are built organically and on top of a core of hyperloyal true believers.
Cults need to leverage their disciples to grow via other communities
Lastly, Clubhouse has done a great job of creating a format that fits extremely well on top of the earlier proto-cult platforms.
This is obvious from the screen shots people share of Clubhouse rooms on Twitter, bragging about being in the “room where it happened” and implicitly bragging about their access to the “invite only” network.
The most successful cults are the ones that interface well with the existing communities and cults to which disciples already belong. That is, of course, how Christianity got Christmas trees—from pagan cults whose disciples it was porting over.
This isn’t in and of itself something Clubhouse invented. TikTok has optimized its story format for sharing on other networks. Nearly 20 years ago Facebook leveraged messaging platforms like AIM to bring people over to its service. But I think Clubhouse has done a particularly good job of mixing exclusivity and access to create a currency for disciples that makes them want to share (and brag) to those on the outside.
Is there a path out of digital cults and back to digital community?
In the coming months we are going to see more and more platforms try to adopt the mechanics of cults, which Clubhouse has nailed, and the world head more and more toward cults and away from traditional community building.
The question in my mind is whether—and how—the tide can ever turn back.
Broadly speaking, in the physical world we all started out living and operating in small local communities. Over time, with improved technology and organization, cults and autocracies took over. Those cults and autocracies dominated the physical world for millennia, but eventually democracies rose up and at least partially rolled back those hierarchical models with some semblance of a larger and more powerful community.
What is the equivalent of large-scale democracies in the digital world? What can break cults and turn the tide back in the other direction?
My honest answer is that I am not sure.
The internet will only get bigger and contain more people. The power of leading people in a digital space will continue to increase as cult leaders better monetize their audiences, coming up with more and more clever ways for rewarding adherence (hello, Dogecoin).
I am reasonably certain that the tide will not just naturally turn back. The era of traditional internet communities has drawn to a close, and cults are ascendant.
The next iteration of successful communities might exist, but they are going to have to look very different than they do today. And they will require significant product innovation that allows people to band together and create better experiences that can compete with digital cults.