Inspiration
Many current news platforms are algorithm based and feed into confirmation bias. They are echo chambers which only favour our own perspectives and limit exposure to diverse ones. Thus, we wanted to create an app that helps people step outside the echo chamber and learn about diverse perspectives in a interactive way.
What it does
Alt. is a news platforms that allows users to swipe through their news feed, interact with ones they like and dislike, expand the snippet to show them the full article, and even save the articles that they like.
A key feature we have is our wildcard and alternate news feed. For the wildcard, a news article in a category that you generally do not read in is shown to you. Our alternate news feed will do the same except display an article with an opposing view you may have to broaden your news feeds.
How we built it
We used a variety of technologies to built our application. On the design side, we mainly utilized figma to create mockups. For the development side, we used Next.js and TheNewsAPI for the backend, Mozilla/Readability.js to web scrape the articles, and TailwindCSS, Typescript, and React for the frontend.
Challenges we ran into
Some challenges we ran into were idea generation, how to effectively integrate our idea, and technical challenges, especially with web scraping and backend to frontend integration.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud of our overall app and how we were able to go from ideation, to design, to having a functional app all in a day.
What we learned
We learned some very important technical skills but also working together as a team,
What's next for Alt.
We are looking to add a points system to incentivize users to further explore broad perspectives.
Built With
- figma
- mozilla/readability.js
- next.js
- react
- tailwindcss
- thenewsapi
- typescript
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