Clubhouse (app)

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2020 · iPhone app made by Alpha Exploration Co., San Francisco · Also known as Clubhouse app; Talkshow (early name)

What it is

Clubhouse was a phone app for live conversation by voice only. There were no pictures, videos or written posts. You opened it, saw a list of "rooms", each one a live chat on a topic, and could walk into any of them to listen. A few people sat on the "stage" and talked. Everyone else listened with their microphone off and could tap a hand icon to ask to speak. At first nothing was recorded, so if you missed it, it was gone.

Where it came from

Paul Davison and Rohan Seth released it for iPhones in March 2020, just as COVID-19 lockdowns kept people at home. You could only join if a member invited you, and each member got only a few invites. Tech investors used it first. In late January and early February 2021 Elon Musk spoke in a room, other celebrities turned up too, and downloads reportedly jumped from about 3.5 million to over 8 million in a fortnight. In Germany and elsewhere people passed invites along in chains through group chats.

Why it mattered

For a few months in early 2021 it looked like the next big way to be online. Twitter reportedly discussed buying it for about $4 billion, and investors valued it at that figure anyway. Then the bigger companies copied it: Twitter Spaces, Spotify Greenroom, Facebook's Live Audio Rooms. By the time it opened to everyone in July 2021, lockdowns were easing and the same feature sat inside apps people already used. Usage fell away, and in April 2023 it cut half its staff.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Clubhouse shows how much of an app's pull can come from being hard to get into. People wanted the invite and the chance of hearing Musk more than the conversations themselves, and once both were gone they left, even though the app worked exactly the same.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.