I was in your shoes when I was 17. I built a social app to replace Orkut's communities (which Google bought and killed) and a chat app before Discord took off.

I was in your shoes when I was 17. I built a social app to replace Orkut's communities (which Google bought and killed) and a chat app before Discord took off. Some advice: - If you want to improve as a developer, keep building features, but if you want to improve as an entrepreneur, avoid that and focus on user growth first. Beware of spreading your small community too thin with new features. In my case, I allowed the creation of new groups too soon, and people became too dispersed. - AI verification is tricky. If you can build an AI that detects AI-generated content, you could theoretically use that knowledge to build a better model that fools your verification (GANs). One strategy might be going invite-only to create exclusivity, though this has its own drawbacks. - Social media is too broad a field. Focus on a niche of people who want to communicate but lack a platform. For example, one of my biggest successes came from announcing my chat app during a Dota 2 International tournament—I got 2,200 concurrent users within an hour (this was before Discord). I've never learned as much as I did when I released my own apps. Even if they go nowhere, the knowledge you gain is invaluable.