Ask HN: Actively looking for co-founders for my growing startup

> allowing to anyone to find trustworthy

should be allowing for anyone to find..

Also, I understand why you indicate your alma mater as 'one of the best' because most people outside Colombia likely won't know it, but you should still list what institution it is, simply because the vague-ness is a little discomforting.

Overall I think a simple Reddit-style moderation with votes can certainly do a lot to improve an experience like this, but reputation systems are very difficult. There are many ways to game/manipulate systems like this, starting with basic sybil attacks, but also coercion (e.g. show me your privates or I downvote you), and other imaginative abuses. It might be worth discussing moderation strategies beyond the voting system.

Finally, $1 a year payments sound like a lot of user friction for little benefit, and also payment processors are likely going to take a large fraction of that. It's a difficult choice, but some kind of 'freemium' model seems attractive here: a few dollars for high-quality emotes, etc. People that really use and enjoy a service tend to be quite open to payments like this, and it's a proven model for games, Twitch.tv, etc.

Also, have you explored if Amazon has any accelerator programs you’d qualify for to get some AWS credits to tide you over (paging jeffbarr).

Also as someone who has been using these kinds of apps for nearly two decades, it's really hard to detect bad behavior. Poor ratings don't necessarily mean someone is bad - they could just be slow to respond. Dirty words may be acceptable to both sides.

I'd say the safest way to handle it is to ban accounts that exceed a certain ratio of blocks.

People block for really frivolous reasons. Sometimes someone is enjoying a conversation, but have to head out and do something else. They don't want to get downvoted for "ghosting" so they block the other person. I even had one friend who used to block everyone after a conversation because he didn't know what "block" meant, and thought it was a way of closing conversations.