How blocking works on the voice-only group chat app Clubhouse:
When you block someone on Clubhouse, it doesn’t just affect communications between the two of you, as it would on Facebook or Twitter. Rather, it limits the way that person can communicate with others too. Once blocked, they can’t join or even see any room that you create, or in which you are speaking—which effectively blocks them for everyone else in that room. If you’re brought “onstage” from the audience to speak, anyone else in the audience whom you have blocked will be kept off the stage for as long as you’re up there. And if you’re a moderator of a room, you can block a speaker and boot them from the conversation in real time—even if they’re mid-sentence.
Imagine a live panel discussion in which each member of the panel has the power to cut the mic of any other member, at any moment and for any reason, and also the power to have that person dragged from the lecture hall by security. That’s roughly how blocking works on Clubhouse. This is not just a personal decision, but a social act, with implications for who can speak at what times and in what settings.
There’s even a visible emblem of this regime. When a user you don’t follow has been blocked by some unspecified number of people whom you do, that user’s profile will appear on your app with an ominous icon: a black shield with a white exclamation point. Clubhouse calls this feature a “shared block list.” Some users call the badge the “black check mark”
Today’s techniques to control our own social media experience have been designed for algorithmic feeds. Here, each person has their own list of who they follow. Tools like block, mute account, mute keywords apply to one’s own experience.
A Clubhouse room is by its design a continuously shared experience. Giving one particiapnt the ability to control their experience affects others. This is not to judge Clubhouse’s tools – I have not thought about them well enough – but it is clear that different social experiences are emerging, Clubhouse-like rooms perhaps being the most promiment among them [1], and designers will need to create different tools for each of them.
[1] Venmo, the person-to-person payment app, also shares your payments on a public and semi-public feed, creating a different social experience. While you have some control over privacy, as the USA president Biden learnt, it’s not always enough.