I agree, that original content is probably what people would come for. But at the same time, there's a bit of a chicken and egg problem like all marketplaces. You are not going to come to spend time uploading to a ghost town platform, and people are not going to come to a ghost town platform for content.

It helps for the platform to look "busy" to feel a bit more confident about adding your content, original or not.

I'm reminded of the Indie Hackers example. There were other places to read about bootstrapped startups - HN, Twitter, etc... when Courtland started IH, people thought it was a waste of time. He had to fake a lot of the content just posting everything as himself. This helped draw in other boostrapped founders to share their original content. They needed the appearance of a busy community in order to contribute their own time and energy.

Ideally, you would just attract a bunch of original content creators and start that way - like Substack, but we don't have unlimited VC money ;(

Seeding a platform with some content at least gives it the appearance of some business and "legitness". Sure, users will continue using YouTube for example, but at least they won't come and see nothing and close the tab instantly. In fact, they may even find a piece or 2 of original content for some niche they like and that may keep them on the website a bit and keep exploring over time.

Slowly but surely you get more original content, and a lot of duplicate stuff. Sometimes you attract a certain group of people who come for specific type of content, and that is enough to get the wheels in motion.

There's SEO benefits too, but in our case that has to be cached I guess.

A lot of this just depends on the founder's hustle game. Grease the wheels on both sides enough with some strategic positioning and good marketing and something may emerge.