How Soviet phone users accidentally discovered ‘Clubhouse’ in the 1980s Before the Clubhouse app went viral in 2021, Soviet people had known everything about it.
Long before the success of Clubhouse, Soviet youth discovered that a technical glitch in automatic telephone stations allowed them to join “conference rooms”, where they could talk, make new friends and even find a one-night stand.
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It’s impossible to say who discovered the existence of so-called “broadcasts” [эфиры] in the Soviet landline system, but two facts are fairly certain: the broadcasts appeared in the 1980s and came as a result of a technical malfunction.