One fatal issue with clubhouse is quality/recommendation. My timeline was full of people chatting about nonsense. Obviously there were high quality rooms but they were like a need in a haystack

And here comes the problem. At YouTube or Medium, they solve this by user curation (likes) and algorithm to find good content, but they are not live, so they can do that. Clubhouse cannot do the same, since it happens real time and no conventional algorithm or users can deal with that. They failed to come up with a solution for that, and hence no incentive to waste time there in hope that I encounter the needle in their crapstack.

Recording would have eased that issue. But I assume they believed recording will kill the urgency, also less convincing to investors as it will make them yet another podcast platform