Whoa, I guess this will be my first post on w2ch- hello! I come from textboard.org (RIP) and also zdiskuss; I spotted this thread on wiby while checking if zdiskuss was indexed yet. This thread turned out to be the only hit besides the site itself. I'll be using the post syntax from textboard- if that's wrong then oh well!
>>6> I wonder why image boards are the only ones that survived outside of Japan.
I'll tack on a few reasons as a twenty-something y/o American: They're not easy (for a mouth-breather) to find, they _usually_ expect interesting posts over the span of weeks and months, and they don't have any pornography to keep "people" entertained.
These are obviously features to enjoy, but the cost of a nice, easygoing place is that it won't, by definition, have the hustle and bustle of a big platform and seem dead by comparison to other places online.
> Part of the activity problem is [...] how difficult it is to actually keep yourself in the habit of checking multiple sites, [...] That's why I wanted to create an aggregate site
You're on the right track, but I think a better answer is to look into RSS or Atom feeds, and teach your users how to use local newsreader programs to help them keep up. If you're not concerned with per-view advertisements, i.e. by requiring money to use the site, then there isn't the bemoaned downside of RSS reducing the amount of 'real' traffic (in actuality: traffic that loads adverts.)
It also addresses:
>>7> But in the long term, it could lock them into the same sites available
Because RSS newsreader programs can consume any RSS feeds, you can add as many sites you want to the portal.
> Your idea reminds me of a kind of mega web portal, and I love it wwwwww
and onto this ^, at the same time you can also create a web page containing the feed content as well, as a service to people who cannot install a feed reader or who just want to peek from time to time. These sites are called Planets and many open source programming communities still maintain them, like KDE or the i2p project.
That's my go-en for any kind of new interactive social system. For the idea of a video platform desired by OP, several well-praised edutainment creators made their own distribution platform called Nebula where the creators own the company hosting their content. Maybe you could make something similar, but just slightly less gatekept? Who knows.
> I think it's one of the main reasons why people on the modern web are obsessed with being famous.
You are spot on. Fame gets to people, makes them chase the trends and debase what they want to say down to mass-market slop instead of making something concrete and real.