Why Is Everyone Talking About Clubhouse?

In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, two techies started a new social network built around an increasingly unloved feature of people’s iPhones: actually talking into it. The app, called Clubhouse, was at first niche. There are no posts, no pictures, no videos. As if to underline how little time you need to look at it, the home screen is a white-on-beige endless scroll of conference calls, called “rooms,” filled with people you might not know organized around topics like police brutality, music, sex, or whatever else was on people’s minds. Users can be moderators, hosting their own conversations and controlling who speaks. A digital audience can listen in, or ask to participate if they have something to say. The action happened all in your earbuds.   The app, started by Paul Davison, an entrepreneur who’d previously sold a company to Pinterest, and Rohan Seth, a former Google engineer, was a way to get people talking and trading ideas spontaneously, without filters or having to put on an outfit, they later wrote. At first, it was open to only a few thousand users — though they were the right users,  » Read More