I finally got a Clubhouse invite on Sunday night, three weeks after everyone I follow on Twitter started talking about it like it was the second coming of the podcast. A friend who does audio production for a living sent it over during the Super Bowl, of all times, while the Bucs were putting up 21 points in the second quarter and I was only half paying attention to either screen.
For anyone who's managed to avoid the noise: Clubhouse is an audio-only app, invite-only, iPhone-only, where you drop into "rooms" and either listen or raise your hand to talk. No video, no text, nothing to look at but a grid of circular profile pictures that light up when someone's speaking. It sounds like almost nothing when you describe it and then you open it at 11pm intending to check it out for five minutes and you're still there at 1am listening to a room of strangers argue about NFTs.
I only had two invites to give out when I signed up, which felt stingy given how badly people have been begging for them. I gave one to my sister, who used it once and hasn't opened the app since, and I'm sitting on the other one out of some weird instinct to save it for someone who'll actually appreciate it. That's a very online-2011-blogger thing to admit, I realize, hoarding a digital invite like it's a Gmail beta code again.
The rooms themselves are a mixed bag. I sat in on one Sunday night that was ostensibly about startup fundraising and turned into forty minutes of a guy explaining, unprompted, why he thinks audio is "the last unbundled medium." I left. I sat in another one Monday that was just people reading Robinhood's app store reviews out loud and laughing, which was genuinely funny for about fifteen minutes and then wasn't. And then Monday afternoon Tesla filed that update saying they'd put $1.5 billion into Bitcoin, and by that evening it felt like every third room on the app had somehow rebranded itself into a crypto discussion, regardless of what it was originally about. I don't have a strong take on Tesla's balance sheet decisions. I do have a take on how fast an app full of extremely online people can pivot an entire evening's worth of conversation around one Monday afternoon SEC filing.
Here's my actual opinion, since I said I'd give one: I don't think Clubhouse survives in its current form past the summer. Not because the idea is bad, the live-audio thing genuinely works better than I expected, but because the whole appeal right now is built on scarcity and novelty stacked on top of each other. Invite-only plus iPhone-only plus "you had to be there because it's not recorded" is a hell of a lot of exclusivity for one app to be running at once, and exclusivity is expensive to maintain once a few million more people want in. Somebody's going to build the Android version, or Twitter's going to bolt something similar onto its own product (I'd bet real money on this one), and a chunk of the appeal evaporates the second it's not a velvet rope anymore.
The other thing nobody's talking about yet is how exhausting it is as a format. Reading is skimmable. A podcast you can play at 1.5x or scrub through. A Clubhouse room demands real-time attention with no rewind, which is a genuinely weird ask in 2021 when everything else about how we consume things has moved toward on-our-own-schedule. I like the idea of it a lot more than I like actually sitting through an hour of it.
Anyway, if anyone wants my last invite, my email's in the sidebar like it's been for the last decade. First person to actually ask gets it. Everyone else, I'll see you in a room arguing about Bitcoin at midnight, probably.