[DogOnTheWeb]

I worked at FB in a partner team and this isn’t exactly what happened.

When these products were chartered Clubhouse was in the middle of a massive upswing and the industry was convinced that live audio was the next format threat akin to TikTok’s short form videos or Snap’s stories format. Just as we’ve seen with those formats, every big company got the wheels turning to compete in the space.

It turned out that the hype around Clubhouse was because it was a particularly great product for tech influencers (VC and media), but consumer experience wasn’t enough to cross the chasm and retain users at scale. When it became clear that Clubhouse was destined to be more like Houseparty than TikTok, all the big platforms except for Twitter basically cooled on the space and focused elsewhere.

[bombcar]

Exactly, everyone got burned by TikTok (assuming it would die like Vine did) and so now anything that appears to be the "next TikTok" causes a flurry of activity.