I kind of admire how it is done, not saying I like it but I respect the player. I really reads like someone reads Nir Eyal's _Hooked_ and executed most of it. Especially the elitism created by invite only, with some kind of 'hacks' for aspiring users like reserving the user name. Then the possibility to be part of a conversation, maybe even with celebrities.
Let's see what kind of platform it becomes, at some point they need to make money and a lot of advertisement will creep in. And then, as the article mentioned, let's see how it works out with hate speech and all the things humans seem to produce whenever they don't fear direct consequences.
How can that draw users in? The point is it's exclusive. If you read the article it says 'and boy, are invites hard to come by'. So they can get my interest... but they literally can't draw me in can they because I can't join if I wanted to. They can't convert.
Do you know it's against the site guidelines here to just accuse people of not reading the article rather than actually presenting an argument?
It doesn't matter how attractive a platform is if you simply aren't going to get onto it. Clubhouse can make me interested, but can't actually get me onboarded.