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Comment by stevehawk | Hacker News Reader

wouldn't suppose you could tell me what it's for? I see someone saying that Twitter recreated it.. but that doesn't mean anything to me.. their website is so arrogant as to basically only offer a link to download the app.. because I should just.. "know" what they do?

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Clubhouse was a product that had the most perfect launch timing in the past decade: a social gathering app right as the COVID pandemic started.

That was it.

Seems like it was really popular for about 3 months. And then it was just annoying.

It was very briefly billed to be the FB killer.

Which was always an amazing take, since Facebook works by giving you a few minutes to catch up on friends/groups while you're sitting on the toilet or waiting for a bus. It doesn't require you to be in a quiet place and more or less concentrating for an hour in order to get anything out of it.

It's essentially a conference call app. You create a room or space or whatever and you can participate or listen in on audio. Some have called it live podcasting. But it's a conference call in the most basic sense. Twitter copied it with Spaces, which feels like a more natural fit. The reason Clubhouse is so popular, or was so popular is that a16z funded it at the peak of zero interest rates. Clubhouse is a ZIP and will likely either get acquired or go out of business as it seems many have stopped using it.

What’s a zip? (Aside from being a pretty hard thing to search for…)

Zero Interest rate Phenomena

zip, zilch, zero, nada, null, ngmi

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