Tech hype cycles can be short or long. One that happened so quickly I missed the downturn was the furor over Clubhouse, the audio only social media app. “Everybody” was hosting shows, invites were being doled out to drive FOMO and excitement, Twitter was going to buy them for $4 billion; and then *blink* nobody gives a shit anymore, big funding and acquisition news dries up, and the company itself is talking down the hype. It’s not quite as hilarious as the hype cycle around the Yo app (a briefly and bizarrely hyped up social app that let people and brands text “yo” and nothing else), but it’s the same pattern. For me, the issue with Clubhouse seems to be you don’t need a special app for audio only. Go on just about any platform’s “go live” option and don’t turn your camera on. Tah-dah, it’s Clubhouse, and the audience you’ve already cultivated is there. This can be dismissed as small thinking or the kind of person who said “eh, the iPad is just a big phone”, but often it’s correct.
Ultimately technologies need to have some kind of support model, whether that’s profitability or a community of dedicated (not trapped) users or something else. And you need enough of it, as the dedicated but unfortunately too small fanbase for City of Heroes could tell you. You can ride the hype cycle, get the VC money, and cash out, but in the end you’re not really doing anything worthwhile, just stirring the money pool for a bit and seeing what rises to the surface. It’s a living, I suppose.
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