I'm not sure it would be so easy to find a fifty-year-old who had been in the Tiananmen Square protests and who was playing WOW or Starcraft, but fair enough.

I'm not sure it would be so easy to find a fifty-year-old who had been in the Tiananmen Square protests and who was playing WOW or Starcraft, but fair enough. My post explicitly said that Clubhouse's combination of existing technology is what makes it unique - voice chat, topic/person discovery, search. All of those things are possible through other mash-ups of existing technology. Hell, you could conceivably clone Clubhouse with a Minecraft server and Discord. But CH has the overall experience that reduces friction. And now it also has network effects, since enough interesting people are on it that the experience is just that much better. I, likewise, share the concern that the CCP will use its heavy hand to destroy CH. I hope the founders are smart enough to divest from CCP-controlled tech ASAP.