I'd like to say that what makes reddit and twitter big and important is not technical sophistication. It is the fact that a lot of interesting people are there — so another person would join to read and interact with them.
So I'd try to build the simplest thing that conveys the idea and provides the experience (twitter was initially a Rails app), and spend most of the effort on getting and keeping interesting people aboard. These trendsetters are the users you want to listen to, and pander to. You went them around. You want their audience around.
I can remember a somehow similar site, only more minimalist, founded like 15 years ago. It was friendfeed.com: link sharing, posting commenting, real-time IM-like updates (it even had a Jabber gateway for some time). It was great, though it never grew huge. Facebook bought them and acquired their most important invention, the "Like" button.
I don't say that technical sophistication is not important! It is. But it becomes important when your social / communication mechanics work, and you have a number of real users. Until then, you want your technology small and easily malleable. Back in the day I've seen a brilliant online community forming around a few hundred lines of Perl scripts. Guys from friendfeed first came with a schemaless DB, and only later with the high-performance Tornado server (in Python still). Guys from YouTube first found the area where their site was useful (not their initial dating, but video publishing and discovery), and later came up with advanced video delivery solutions. Same likely applies to your site.
> I'd like to say that what makes reddit and twitter big and important is not technical sophistication. It is the fact that a lot of interesting people are there — so another person would join to read and interact with them.
Adopting Twitter's user acquisition strategies does not, in hindsight, seem all that smart considering Twitter's growth relative to its peers? I believe this led to their current predicament where all but the early/'power' users enjoy the vast majority of attention on the platform whilst new users scream into the ether and finally give up on the platform.
Yes, one can gain a huge following with the time investment involved but for the average user, even hitting a 1K following is a pipe dream. Contrast that with TikTok.
I would say that twitter is built around the concept of a vast space into which everyone can equally talk, not as a great listening or discovery experience. This is why out-of-platform fame is such an important way to discover people there. The platform itself offers few and weak tools to discover interesting feeds to follow. Basically you might notice someone's interesting reply in a random thread, and want to check the user's feed.
Facebook is great at discovering people I might already know. Maybe it's important to reunite with old friends, etc, but it's not really important to me. Facebook does a seriously better job presenting communities I may be interested in; there I could encounter interesting people. It also helpfully shows posts liked by people I follow, which is the best form of curated discovery I've encountered so far.
Personally back in the day I joined Google Plus (remember that social network?) mostly because Linus Torvalds and Rob Pike were already there, and wrote something interesting. So I think having luminaries on your network is helpful. Having one's friends is also helpful; often a loose cluster of friends migrates to your platform because it helps them communicate the way they prefer.
So I'd try to build the simplest thing that conveys the idea and provides the experience (twitter was initially a Rails app), and spend most of the effort on getting and keeping interesting people aboard. These trendsetters are the users you want to listen to, and pander to. You went them around. You want their audience around.
I can remember a somehow similar site, only more minimalist, founded like 15 years ago. It was friendfeed.com: link sharing, posting commenting, real-time IM-like updates (it even had a Jabber gateway for some time). It was great, though it never grew huge. Facebook bought them and acquired their most important invention, the "Like" button.
I don't say that technical sophistication is not important! It is. But it becomes important when your social / communication mechanics work, and you have a number of real users. Until then, you want your technology small and easily malleable. Back in the day I've seen a brilliant online community forming around a few hundred lines of Perl scripts. Guys from friendfeed first came with a schemaless DB, and only later with the high-performance Tornado server (in Python still). Guys from YouTube first found the area where their site was useful (not their initial dating, but video publishing and discovery), and later came up with advanced video delivery solutions. Same likely applies to your site.
Good luck!