I would personally build some lightweight clone (http/css only, JS only for content fetching, auth and advertising), except for the following changes

1. Subreddits exist, but only as a way to group content. Creator of subreddit can determine things like css layout and whatever, but cannot set rules on posts, or ban users or delete posts.

2. Upvotes/downvotes on any content can be done once and is irreversible. Any up or down or total counts are hidden. Content (posts and comments) are scored by total number of upvotes, or total votes with sum being close to zero, weighted by the user scores (see below). Option to sort content chronologically as well.

3. Ability to add a special context comment to posts or other comment with option of (supporting evidence, opposing evidence, or unappropriated content), which can be voted on. Context comment that are upvoted or downvoted past 90% with a certain total number of votes, with their status moved from pending to accepted or denied. Context comments themselves can have context comments that work the same way, that can affect the status of the original context. Admins get notified of unappropriated content.

4. User content score and trust score, visible to everyone.

- Content score would represent posting good content, i.e something that gets a lot of upvotes, or a large number of votes with sum close to zero, just like in 1, or posting good comments under those posts). Initial votes on posts or contents with low counts (invisible to the user of course) will count higher towards this score.

-Trust score would depend on the user posting context comments or voting on context comments. Posting or voting in the correct way would increase score, posting context that is downvoted or voting in the opposite way of majority on context decreases score.

I would then use a large portion of funding to essentially pay people for content on a weekly basis, with payouts depending on the product of user engagement with some weighted sum of the content+trust score, and as a fraction of the total pool of money to be paid out.

The overall goal would be to do 2 things.

First, get people to auto scrape the web for good content and post on your app, giving you traffic.

Secondly, create a reliable place for people to read and interact without any bias. The monetary incentive combined with scoring will basically auto mod the website, since real money will be on the line and people would be WAY less likely to troll and shit post and think more about their actions to essentially bet on the most likely outcome in terms of posting stuff and voting, going off what they see alone (since scores will be hidden). Even more so, people would be competing against each other to be good citizens of the website to gain a larger chunk of the payout.

Once you have those 2 in place, you have created something that not only people use, but also something that effectively self moderates without having to remove or ban posts. You may have to do some tweaking on weighting algorithms, but overall most of it should technically work.

You can then take your app any number of ways. You can likely decrease payments for comments to zero, and people will still use it just like they would with Reddit currently, because they will have nowhere else to migrate until someone comes along and offers them money to do so. The user score will serve as an incentive enough to keep interacting, since high user score would take time to attain and thus have value.

The more interesting thing is that there is likely a way you can do decentralized content torrent style, where every leecher/seed is a user. Because every one of those has a score associated with it, it serves as a decentralized way to only serve actual content, preventing malicious actors from serving fake content.