The Drop-In Audio App Clubhouse Is Dying. It Was Fun While It Lasted

I held a Clubhouse chat recently, inviting people to chat about productivity. It’s the subject of a new book I’m writing, and I wanted to spill the beans.

I championed the talk as being helpful as a way to deal with constant distraction and stress, intending to explain what it is like to write 15,000 articles over a period of 20 years.

In the app, I started inviting people left and right. A few months ago, when I was testing Clubhouse and writing about it more, this would lead to dozens of people joining in on the conversation, sometimes hundreds. These days, most people have turned off notifications or ignore them as they join other rooms.

Also, there aren’t as many people.

I noticed a few users I could always rely on to join a chat were not even members anymore. When I posted about the Clubhouse room on my Twitter feed, all I could hear were crickets. This is not good news.

When an app rises in popularity so fast, and everyone is talking about how fun it is to hold an interactive panel discussion over audio chat, it’s a moment you don’t want to miss. I loved chatting with influencers on social media and interviewing book authors.

Like many of you, I drifted away from the app because, for one thing, the world started to open up. Why chat with strangers in an app when I can meet with an actual living and breathing person I know in real life and haven’t seen for a year?

More importantly, Clubhouse really failed to do anything new and different these last few months. You still can’t record a chat. They only recently added Android access. The invite system starts penalizing you right away if you invite too many people, so then you sit helplessly with one or two people waiting for something to happen.

Clubhouse is a victim of its own growth. As the app becomes more popular, your followers suddenly have more options for chat — many of which relate to becoming a millionaire, it seems. The catch is that some of those chats are not that enthralling, and by the way — they are not run by actual millionaires.

I thought about renaming my room “win money if you join my chat” but that would have sounded a bit desperate instead of my intended stab at sarcasm.

So what happens now with Clubhouse?

I’m not sure. I don’t plan on hosting any more chats in the near future. It felt like a colossal waste of time to chat on an app when I could have just done a group phone call instead. Also, inviting people to something so ephemeral and fleeting seems dumb. Tapping an icon for people to get them to join, along with hundreds of other people doing the same thing, seems tedious and not exactly a rich experience. I like that Android users can join the fun, but something is rotten in Denmark.

Also, the numbers are declining. A lot. I suspect many hosts are holding chats and wondering why no one seems that excited to talk about startups or celebrities.

In my room, it felt like the air had been sucked out through a vacuum. A visitor popped in only to leave almost immediately, not waiting long enough to even see what we were talking about. It felt like this massive experiment in doing something novel by hosting an interactive podcast has suddenly collapsed into a heap.

It’s been replaced by something more worthwhile: meeting with real people.