Clubhouse gained popularity for its unique audio rooms feature. But you know what being popular means in the social media land – you get copied. It happened with Snapchat Stories, TikTok and now it’s happening with Clubhouse. The latest app to copy Clubhouse’s audio rooms is Discord. It will let people broadcast live audio conversations to a room of virtual listeners.
Discord is calling it Stage Channels, which is now available now on all platforms where Discord is available – Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, and the web. For reference, the app already offers voice channels, which allows everyone in them to talk freely. A Stage Channel differs by letting a certain set of people talk at once to a group of listeners. It could be useful for more structured events like community town halls or AMAs.
Stage Channels make it easier to understand who’s the focus of the conversation and who’s waiting for their turn to speak. Each Stage has Stage moderators to help manage who is speaking and can add, remove or mute an existing speaker. Audience members can also participate by “raising” their hands during an event if they want to speak. Stage Channels can be enabled in Community so if you want to try out the new feature, make sure to enable Community on your server by going to Server Settings > Community.
Discord is not the only one trying to replicate Clubhouse. Twitter launched its own variant called Spaces, which is also available on Android, unlike the Clubhouse app. While the company says it is working on bringing its app to Android, the competitors are copying its features. Even Spotify and LinkedIn are working on Clubhouse-like audio rooms. And, we all know there’s that one platform that likes to borrow features from other apps – Facebook, which is also working on introducing its Clubhouse rival. Even Telegram and Slack have embraced it.