Clubhouse to soon allow users to filter out explicit rooms

Social audio platform Clubhouse will soon allow users to filter out explicit rooms from its home feed, cofounder Paul Davison said on December 5.

The firm is rolling out a NSFW (Not Safe For Work) toggle on the app later this week that will remove these rooms from the app's homescreen (or hallway as the company calls it). This feature will be available to users through the app's account settings and they will be able to toggle it on or off, Davison said during the company's weekly Townhall on December 5.

While Davison noted that "there aren't a lot of these rooms", the platform has witnessed a significant increase in the explicit content/rooms on the platform, especially after it became available on Android earlier this year.

A Moneycontrol investigation, published on December 4, reported that the platform faces a deluge of 18+ rooms, adult content, and bullying it is unable to keep a lid on.

These rooms are not only turning away a lot of existing users from the platform, it has also started hampering the brand image of the platform, and thereby hurting the monetisation opportunities for creators.

For instance, Sundaram Mutual's Chief Marketing Officer Ajit Narasimhan told Moneycontrol they were initially mulling plans to expand its marketing efforts to Clubhouse. But now, the company is rethinking its strategy. Several other companies have also put similar plans on the backburner, Moneycontrol has learnt.

Read: Porn, bullying and body-part auctions: Inside Clubhouse India’s content moderation struggles

India is one of the key markets for the Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup, evident by the fact that Clubhouse made its first ever country-specific appointment here last month.

It has also rolled out support for seven Indian languages including Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali and Marathi on its Android app with iOS rollout expected soon. As part of this experience, the social audio app will now show in-app prompts, descriptions, topics, notifications and community guidelines in these languages.

This also comes as Clubhouse competes with a growing number of rivals such as Twitter, Facebook, Spotify, Discord and Telegram among others who have launched or are launching their own respective offerings.

In recent months, the company has also announced several new features such as Replays, Backchannel, Universal Search, Clips, Pinned Links, Music Mode, and support for spatial audio among others to woo users and creators onto its platform.

These features could provide a much-needed user boost for the app that has been witnessing slowing user growth across the world.

In India, Clubhouse had witnessed a major spike in its app install base in the months of May and June, after the launch of its Android app and the company dropping the invite-only tag. However, the growth has tapered down significantly in the subsequent months.

Clubhouse had clocked 177,000 downloads on Android in India in November, a 36.3 percent decline from 278,000 downloads in October and from a peak of 5.6 million downloads in June, according to app intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Overall, the app witnessed 188,000 downloads in November, from 290,000 downloads in October and a peak of 5.9 million downloads in June.

Globally, Clubhouse saw 0.87 million downloads across Android and iOS in November, down from 0.96 million downloads in September and a peak of 7.7 million downloads in June.

Aarthi Ramamurthy, head of International at Clubhouse however had said at a recent media interaction that the number of rooms being hosted on the platform on a daily basis has risen to about 700,000 rooms per day, from 300,000 rooms per day earlier this year and an average user currently spends about 70 minutes per day on the platform.

"For us, that's the kind of metric that we want to track where we want to make sure that both creators and listeners are finding value or building communities on the platform," she said.

Read: Live audio brings new challenges in terms of content moderation: Clubhouse CEO Paul Davison