AnonyAsk

AnonyAsk is a social media platform in which people can ask questions anonymously, and contents will be moderated to promote healthy social environment

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Inspiration

In a world dominated by social media platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Twitter, and Threads, I felt the need for a different kind of digital space—one that offered more anonymity and a clean social environment. AnonyAsk was born from this vision. It is a platform that strips away the distractions of images, videos, and animations, focusing solely on the power of text to foster genuine connections. AnonyAsk provides a safe haven where individuals can freely express their thoughts, ask questions, and seek answers without the fear of judgment or the pressures of maintaining a certain image. By prioritizing content moderation and promoting respect, kindness, and open-mindedness, AnonyAsk cultivates a positive community that encourages authentic conversations and personal growth. Welcome to AnonyAsk, where you can experience the pure essence of connection without the burden of revealing your identity.

What it does

AnonyAsk is a social media web application where users can share links for other people to ask them questions. After being successfully authenticated, the user will have a succinct home page where they can create new post by clicking on a blue button in right bottom corner. Then, the user can click the share button to copy a link for this post and share with their friends, or even random people online through other platforms like Instagram, Threads, Reddit, etc. Other people can ask a question to the user anonymously, and the user will receieve those questions and can view them by clicking on the posts listed on home page. Then, the user can answer those questions. To prevent negative speech like toxic, sexual, profanity, etc, there's a content moderating system reject bad message to maintain the platform as a healthy social environment.

How we built it

I built myself by first brainstorming the ideas, and then made a concrete plan and divide and conquer. I used MERN stack as the application architecture: serverless MongoDB database, express.js as backend apis, react.js to render frontend UI, and node.js as environment. For object modeling I used Mongoose to work with MongoDB. To enhance the UI I also took advantage of Bootstrap for layout. Also, I host the application on Google Cloud Run to take advantage of cloud technology and used Google Cloud Natural Language AI API to build my content moderation mechanism.

Challenges we ran into

I huge challenge for me is to make the app production level, which means I need to take care of all use cases and do error handling for everything. I've been testing the app for so many times and also invited my friends and found many unexpected bugs, such as unexpected authentication levels and the access key expired problem, which makes me fixing it by using child process. Another challenge I ran into is how to handle the complicated tech stack and integrate everything together. I had experience in web application in Ruby on Rails but did not know the MERN stack. I learnt about this because I want to build application using MongoDB and Google Cloud Run, then I was struggling learning from those projects samples as they are not trivial, so I tried to start from the other way: instead of learning how to use MERN stack then develop, I made my plan first and list what I need. I found that I need to model objects, need to develop api routes, need UI template need css layout, and need connection to database etc. By conquering each specific needs I found solutions about how MERN stack can solve them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The huge accompliments is definitely developing my own. I need to do everything from ideation to realization. Compared to working in team most of time I don't feel motivated and when I have questions the only person to turn to is myself. I learnt how to use the MERN stack, how to set up google cloud features and authentications, also tried many different ideas and approaches and finally complete this project within a week while I have to do my internship it a huge.

What we learned

In this digital world, we can actually solve 90% of our answers online, but we need to be able to ask the right question, be brave to fail, be humble to learn from every fail. Also, for those challenges, it's crucial not to give up and be persistent. In my development, I was considering give up at many points, because I'm developing on my own and I can't see if I really can finish the projects. I was stuck for hours in object modeling due to a detail syntax, also struggled a lot to create secure user authentication, and I've spent hours learning how to use google cloud technology by watching many tutorials and read documentations. The key is never give up and try asking the right question, and learn from failure.

What's next for AnonyAsk

In the future, first, AnonyAsk could have better UI which requires more research about how to design a website make people free easy and comfortable to use. Another thing is probably we can develop content feed features and let users to choose if they want. Essentially, many social medias nowadays feed users other people's post, but I'd like to feed people questions to care about them as human being. People like to share about themselves and tell their stories if many people care, and people also want to care about other people in anonymous way many times, so they can express freely. Finally, I'd like to develop mobile version of AnonyAsk and integrate with other popular social media platforms so you can share questions to a larger user base easily.

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