When real money is involved on the internet the worst kinds of stuff results, and it takes a lot of effort to avoid it. How's that going to work?
None of this is to take away from your accomplishments here, by the way. The exact opposite in fact, you've got an interesting enough idea that it prompts interesting questions of the mechanics.
P.S. do you have any long-term plans to IPO this if it becomes successful? If not, some kind of guarantee that this platform is immune to enshittification would probably be very, very popular.
This is a solid call out. Part of me wants to keep things private in order to maintain the "user is the customer" alignment. One issue with going public is it then means shareholders become your primary customer, with your users becoming second tier. I'm not quite sure what the answer is.
This also brings me to the question of funding - on one hand, proper funding here would help drastically with launching, on the other hand it comes with expectations and requirements.
Part of the reason why I want paid users though is it means the site can be self-sustaining without that funding, if it can get past the network effect threshold.
Lots to think about.