When I visit the root domain I shouldn't be greeted with a marketing splash page, you need interesting content in the user's face right away, entice their curiosity and drive the user to explore the site... even as a fellow developer, my first instinct is to abandon the page as soon as I'm greeted with the cliche startup marketing page. Consider the user experience when I visit reddit.com or news.ycombinator.com or any other link aggregation competitor. What you have now is a tech demo, not a platform. Sorry if that's a little harsh, but I mean well! Good luck!
My original plan was to pay for ~100 users accounts and seed the site with content for a proper launch. Given what's happening today though, it felt at least pertinent to show off the current state and get some feedback.
The balance between splash page on landing / landing on content is a hard one, but I think you're right. I am worried though that without conveying the initial business model, it'll be harder for users to understand that this isn't a direct reddit clone.
Wish you the best of luck with this. And I'll look into posting my stuff on there as well, as I said there really isn't any reason not to
I’m obviously not targeting this at you but a business model likes this (paying fractions of a penny per upvote) is not likely to attract high quality content. In fact the opposite it incentives a quantity over quality approach (i.e. content has to be just good enough to get upvoted spending more effort is wasted)
In a way Reddit did distinguish their usual "this content is better than the one below" upvote with "this is amazing content" by giving Reddit gold. A similar system could be used here. One thing that made Reddit great was that since people up (and maybe more importantly) downvoted content good stuff would float to the top. It would be pretty bad if upvotes where too meaningful as that would drive away engagement.