A lot of the comments here are saying that Clubhouse is a lot of noise and very little signal. I largely agree that's what did it in, but I think I joined right

A lot of the comments here are saying that Clubhouse is a lot of noise and very little signal. I largely agree that's what did it in, but I think I joined right before it hit that growth inflection point, and I was able to find something of a community until everyone kind of gave up. One night I had a discussion with a guy who had protested at Tiananmen Square in 1989, then went back to his university the day before the tanks rolled in. Later, he emigrated to the US. I met and befriended another guy who lived in Austin and was giving updates about the then-current Texas freeze. He was loosely connected to some of the folks behind NumPy/Anaconda, and so I got to spend several nights hanging out with them, which was pretty interesting. The biggest problem was always search/reputation (judging from my re-opening of the app for the first time in months, this is still the biggest problem). It was always gamed by "influencer" types, whose number one skill was glomming onto the New Hotness/Current Thing. Usually when opening the app, I'd need to scroll through one or two screen lengths of junk (e.g. "chat w/ [retired pro athlete] NFTs!!!", "be your own record label!!!") to find a topic that seemed remotely interesting. Filtering was (is?) hot garbage until I was following around 50 active users. The product people never realized that the truly influential people who were interesting were not on Clubhouse 16 hours a day, but would be on for an hour or two; the rest of the time, they were honing their craft at something outside of influencer culture. The other major problem was notification fatigue. I went through a phase of intense work on a side project, and didn't have time for Clubhouse very often. The app had some bug where it wouldn't respect my relatively spartan notification preferences, and was pinging me all the time, so I just disabled them altogether. A couple months later, I realized I had not been in there for a while, and when I logged in, few of the people I had connected with were still active (this was around a year ago). Ultimately, I think Clubhouse was an idea that in its current implementation could only exist during the pandemic. That being said, at times it felt like YouTube did back in '06 or Twitter in 2010: you could connect with anyone and learn about nearly any topic with a bit of dedication. Unlike a lot of the social networking experiences these days, it truly felt like there was a chance to meet someone who in the regular course of life you'd never get to meet.