As a former Quora Top Writer (2013 and 2014), that makes a lot of sense to me. And faster, I'd bet.

What made Quora special in the early days was the high-quality community. Smart questions, smart writers answering them, even a reasonable proportion of smart comments. That seems to be the same sort of magic that Clubhouse has managed. It's not the technology, it's the community.

But as Quora tried to scale, that got worse and worse. It wasn't a small set of staff doing moderation, but a wider group of volunteers. The average quality of the questions declined. Comments became more tiresome. A lot of people started writing answers not for the joy of it, but because Quora's larger platform provided them with a means to some personal end. Comments became more tiresome. Indeed, now one of the first search results I get for "Quora" now is an article titled "How to use Quora to power up your lead generation." Ugh.

I'll be really surprised if Clubhouse manages to avoid a similar fate. There's a very low barrier to entry.

But "lead generation" is the fate of all social networks. It may be cool at the beginning, but very soon marketers will figure out how to use it for commercial purposes, and this will become 90% of the use. It is the same story on Facebook, Pinterest, and so many others.

Yup. User-generated content is prized by social networks because it's free to acquire. But over time, you get what you pay for.

I don't have/don't want a Clubhouse account (it seems like a very cringe-inducing platform for people past their prime), but I actually think you're wrong.

Quora lends itself toward SEO spam. It's written word. Clubhouse currently isn't archived in a machine-readable format. This eliminates a decent 60% of the value for commercial purposes, and probably 30% will be taken care of by users having the common sense to avoid any overwhelmingly-obvious marketing.

Of course, it already is seemingly just a platform for aging capitalists and twitter users to "have discussions," which seems like shorthand for "advertise themselves." I couldn't call it good by any means. But that's more or less what every social media platform is, and not different than what you'd find anywhere else.

However, it seems unlikely it'll get much worse from here.

I'm not saying that SEO spam will be clubhouse's problem. But there are more kinds of marketing than SEO. The "investment seminar" scam, for example, has been running for decades in the real world.

I also think it's a mistake to think that common sense will save us. Everybody has weaknesses, and any given scam is carefully optimized for its target audience.

But that's already happening on it! It therefore wouldn't be dropping in quality from where it already is!

Your theory is that there's no way for the proportion of low-quality content to increase?

Correct, because it's all pretty much low-quality content by most standards.

Any platform that 'recommends' content on the basis of user behaviour is going to incentivize spam. Clubhouse is new so maybe that's not there yet. The spammers will only open the floodgates once the audience is big enough.

My instinct says you’re exactly on track.

Unfortunately.

Clubhouse is great right now and it seems to take far too long between “lightning strikes” of awesome communities.

This is my feeling as well; Quora had the same feel when it was launched and now it's basically worthless with people only posting to promote their product/business.

I've found Quora pretty active, but I just use it to offhandedly ask dumb questions like "if Easter is so good why isn't there a Wester" whenever I think of them.

Half the time the answers are actually very educational and the other half it's a Facebook-style reply where an old person yells at me because they misread the question.

The one exploitative thing I've noticed is there's a "partner program" that pays you to ask questions, but it seems impossible to make more than 10c off it in a lifetime.