Anyone Can Join Clubhouse!
The social media app that came to life during the pandemic is expanding its scope, eliminating its invite-only feature and waitlist.
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Clubhouse: Drop-in audio chat
The invite-only social media application had people looking up ways to ‘hack’ its invite system throughout the pandemic to see what all the ‘buzz’ is about is going public.
Anyone and everyone can now join Clubhouse following an update that terminated the waitlist that, according to a Clubhouse spokesperson, had 10 million people on it. The spokesperson also said that the people who were on the waitlist would be slowly added over time.
"The invite system has been an important part of our early history," read a blog post about the changes. "By adding people in waves, welcoming new faces each week in our Wednesday Orientations, and talking with the community each Sunday in Town Hall, we’ve been able to grow Clubhouse in a measured way, and keep things from breaking as we’ve scaled."
"We know there will be many more ups and downs as we scale, and competition from the large networks will be fierce. But we believe the future is created by optimists — and we're excited to keep working to build a different kind of social network," said Clubhouse founders Paul Davison and Rohan Seth.
If you attempt to download Clubhouse and sign up today, you will be able to join normally, as the measure of adding the millions of users at the same time could be to protect the app's servers from getting overloaded.
The audio-based platform launched in March 2020, right as the pandemic started creeping in all over the world, forcing many to stay home due to lockdowns and prompting them to find new and innovative ways to entertain themselves, it seemed that the app full of politicians, influencers, academics, and entrepreneurs was the form of entertainment everyone was looking for, as the then-iOS-exclusive application's downloads skyrocketed, receiving worldwide popularity.
Around nine months after launching, in March 2021, Clubhouse's value was reported to be $1 billion. Two months later, the app expanded its scope to include Android as well.
Clubhouse's move of pulling the plug on the waitlist and invite-only system came only a week after it introduced Backchannel, a feature that allows users to message other users without leaving the app.
The Clubhouse team said that 10 million messages were sent within the first day of launch, and more than 90 million were sent within the first week.