Maybe the real lesson is Clubhouse worked about as well as the idea would let it. It will never scale to billions of users because you’ll never get that many people interested in the idea of eavesdropping in live voice chats.
Billions on one topic? I agree. Millions on one topic? Sure that is possible. Just look at talk radio ,which is still alive. Many shows had listeners in the millions and still do,
Clubhouse's format was about synchronous audio - you have to be there at the moment something is said to hear it. They can add a recording feature to it, but then it's just a poor man's podcast platform.
> Many shows had listeners in the millions and still do
Citation needed? Actual radio listenership has plunged through the floor. Podcasts certainly command that kind of audience size regularly - but again, async, which is a key distinction from the Clubhouse format.
More generally media has evolved from synchronous to asynchronous, and everywhere where they've competed the market has chosen in favor of async media. Broadcast TV is (mostly) dead in favor of on-demand streaming, talk radio is (mostly) dead in favor of podcasts.
The merits of async are huge in terms of audience size - there's a reason the format itself has pivoted towards podcasts. It feels like Clubhouse's synchronicity is both its greatest asset (i.e., novelty, candidness, spontaneity) and worst liability (i.e., intrinsic limit to audience availability) - and honestly it seems pretty obvious at this point what the net viability of the idea was, given that constraint.