I know you think its just social media smartass, but the guy specifically mentioned getting the opinions of a private group, and exporting the data so as to post the best photos on a completely seperate platform.

Its not social media, its kinda similar, but not public, and its main goal is to export the approval data to be used elsewhere. No ones supposed to keep scrolling on it

I know that the youtuber james scholz (jvscholz) mentioned recently that he is working on developing such a project. It even had a landing page. I can't find the link again however and would have to click through all his youtube videos.

I'm being sarcastic because Hacker News itself, and more generally Reddit, fits that exact description.