The 11-month-old audio social network is compelling. It also has some very grown-up problems.
A few nights ago, after my weekly trip to the grocery store, I sat in my car glued to Clubhouse, the invitation-only social audio app.
While my ice cream thawed in the trunk, I dropped in on a room where Tom Green, the former MTV shock comedian and star of “Freddy Got Fingered,” was debating the ethics of artificial intelligence with a group of computer scientists and Deadmau5, the famous Canadian D.J.
When that was over, I headed to a room called NYU Girls Roasting Tech Guys. There, I listened to college students playing a dating game in which contestants were given 30 seconds of stage time to try to seduce someone else in the audience.
And after a few rounds of that, I joined a room called the Cotton Club, in which users changed their avatars to black-and-white portraits and pretended to be patrons of a 1920s-style speakeasy, complete with jazz soundtrack.
Two hours later, my ice cream fully liquefied, I emerged from the car with the feeling that I had just experienced something special. It was all fascinating, surprising and a little surreal, like peeking into the windows of interesting strangers’ houses. And it gave me a flashback to a similar euphoria I felt years ago, when celebrities and creative weirdos started showing up on Facebook and Twitter.
I’ve been spending a lot of time on Clubhouse recently, and the parallels to the early, hypergrowth days of those earlier-generation social networks are uncanny. The 11-month-old app’s popularity — it has more than 10 million users, and invitations are selling for up to $125 on eBay — has set off a mad dash among investors, who have valued the company at $1 billion. Celebrities including Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey and Joe Rogan have shown up in Clubhouse rooms, adding to the buzz. And the app is spawning competition from Twitter and Facebook, which are experimenting with similar products.