You are describing a standard message board. Old things are new again I suppose.

That's exactly it. I would say that the experiment is not so novel, but non-novel experiments are good, too. We retread illuminating experiments from physics in school for good reason.

There are quite a lot of message boards and imageboards, large and small, which check the same boxes. Many of them have not gotten enough traction to catch the attention of the mainstream (e.g. lainchan), and have a distinct vibe.

I think that as soon as your userbase expands into a representative sample of the Internet user population, your platform's culture will become increasingly similar (i.e. "average out") to the largest platforms, e.g. 4chan.