Why we deleted Clubs and made Topics

We shipped a full club system, watched nobody use it, and replaced it with something that isn't even a feature. This is the honest version of that story.

What Clubs were

Hopick's first version organised content the way a lot of community apps do: clubs. You created a club, gave it an icon and a banner, wrote a description, and became responsible for it. Other people joined, and it was your job to keep the place alive.

That sounds reasonable. It's also a job. Setting up a club took effort, maintaining it took more, and most people never needed any of it — they just wanted to talk about a subject. The club model made the app feel heavy before anyone had even posted anything.

The numbers said it quietly

You could tell from how the app was used. Almost nobody was creating clubs. People posted, commented, browsed the feed — but the elaborate machinery of membership and management sat mostly unused. It wasn't broken; it was simply more than the job required. That's the worst kind of design problem, because nothing screams at you about it.

What Topics are instead

We replaced clubs with topics. A topic is just a tag: a word you attach to a post. Anyone can use it, anyone can follow it, and creating a new one takes about two seconds. No icons, no banners, no duties. A post can carry up to three tags, so a restaurant review can be both "food" and "深水埗" at the same time.

The app got simpler overnight. The feed could be filtered by interest, people followed the subjects they cared about, and the whole layer of administration quietly disappeared. Same spirit — organised conversation — without the overhead.

What we lost, honestly

We'd be lying if we said nothing was lost. Clubs gave some people a sense of ownership — a place they ran, a community they built. A tag doesn't offer that feeling, at least not yet. And there's less of a shared identity; a club had a name and a face, while a topic is just a word.

We think the trade is worth it, because the club model only ever worked for the few willing to do the work. Topics work for everyone, including the people who just want to read. In a small community app, that's the difference between a feature people admire and a feature people use.

The thing we keep doing

Here's the part we want to be honest about: we make calls like this regularly, and we're not always right. What we try to be is quick to learn. If Topics turn out to have their own problems — and they will — we'll change them too. Editing a product is mostly deciding what to take away.

The current Hopick is noticeably simpler than the one we launched, and we think that counts as progress. If you've ever built a community — a club, a group chat that somehow became a family — we'd love to know how you think about these trade-offs. You can watch the next decision play out; the conversation happens on our Discord.