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The power of the internet and any position of influence is that you get compounded interest on the number of users who take part in your "network of influence." Not only do you get the power of the people who initially take part in your economy, but you get the benefit of the people they know and you can perpetuate this influence by 'gamifying' the experience and making it competitive in its own right between members of the ecosystem. You can get participation to some degree by intrinsic rewards such as a point system or badges of honor, but you can bring this power even further if the rewards manifest in the real world as tangible discounts, gifts, or experiences.
One of the best ways that iPhones became so prevalent with the invention of iMessage was not just the sharing aspect of better photos than MMS but the subtle color differentiation of green vs blue to non-iPhone or iPhone users respectively. This seems innocuous on first glance but what we have here is sexual selection at it's finest. No affluent, trendy, or "high status" girl would want to interact with someone who could not afford an iPhone, which was cleverly branded as a premium product. Snapchat took a similar role in it's path to success in that it infiltrated Greek life first and got the built in status of University (their primary age demographic) to drive adoption.
TikTok, the latest player in the game, took the path of collecting or through AI, figuring out and mapping real world connections to each other through their hidden link tracking that cannot be removed if sharing a video. It not longer appears as a referral parameter but is built into the link. So any video you share, will link you to the person you share it to, on or off platform. Brilliant. Also the low commitment of short videos that endlessly scroll continue to feed information and content to the user and take a seemingly low barrier to entry to begin you viewing time. TikTok also implements two strictly unique properties that I haven't seen to much in the wild:
1) A form of lottery system in sharing new users to people to get them hooked into creating content, and 'random jumps' between topics.
This leads to point 2) Video between niches back to back often share similar key words that the AI is scraping from every video. So you get contextually different video with the perfect segue: shared language. Just like how the mind makes associations.
See Metcalfe's Law and Reed's Law (Wikipedia) for more about Network Effects.
Reddit is another great example of the benefit from content created by it's users. The subreddits that branch into specific topics and niches take the global user base and break them into smaller units that themselves bring value by uniting people on specific topics. That and their ingenious for it's time commenting system with up and down votes, bring the benefit of showing the top value add at the top of the comment section.
Further progress and growth of your network then takes on a rhizomatic form, when is non-linear value add and growth to the network. Nodes and associations and creativity of the network create a structure that is seemingly coming from within and between the network users. Then exponential connections take root and drive the whole system forward.
Another great way to position yourself is to have a large body of work prepared and ready before you "blow up". Having a catalog of videos or written prose on the Internet for specific topics before you strike a cord with the present societal focus is paramount to becoming an "overnight success." You're ready waiting for the spirit of the times to throw your hat in the ring and reap all the rewards that have been stacking and accumulating over time with little public regard until now. Then with the value add of forever content you can ride that wave of success until the cows come home.