Clubhouse undergoes major redesign prioritizing group audio chats and emphasizing “friendships over followers”

Clubhouse gets a big redesign to focus on group voice chats

The once very-hot Clubhouse app has since become a little bit of the kid who somehow gets ignored… however, the app’s changing direction a bit (or a lot) with its latest update announced in a blog post, and is getting a big redesign to focus more on group interactions with voice.

The app is getting a new feature called Chats. Basically, it’s a voice-only group chat feature, where you are able to send voice messages to friends and receive replies in the form of audio. It’s not live, so you can send and receive voice messages at any time, whenever it’s convenient for you.

You are able to push to talk, listen at 2x, tap to skip, swipe to the next Chat, or chat privately with someone.

However, live audio isn’t going away – it will still remain as one of the main features of Clubhouse. When you open Clubhouse, you’ll see your friends and not only the rooms that happen to be live at that moment.

When you start a chat, you can set it to “friends only” or “friends-of-friends”, so it’s not full of strangers.

The social media platform is now changing its focus on friends instead of followers and depth overreach, explains the blog post. With the friends over followers mindset, the app will have a friend button instead of a follow button. For the people with a lot of followers, you will be able to create a House with all of them so you can easily reach them. Now, you can create Chats within Houses, which should enhance the experience on the platform.