Inspiration
Our team was inspired to develop Argumate by YouTube channels such as Jubilee which brought together people with diametrically opposing views and gave them a platform to argue their view. With Argumate, we seek to provide a similar platform online that, contrary to most social medias nowadays, brings together people with different perspectives instead of having them stuck in echo chambers of their own beliefs and values.
What it does
Argumate has 2 different debate options: a private 1-on-1 section (for every user), and a public debate section (user must opt-in). Every week Argumate will have 3 different debate topics for users to participate in (both privately and publicly) and choose their initial side.
- Then for the private 1-on-1's, we will match users who chose different sides of the same debate topic and have them argue their points on their own to try to convince their "Argumate" to change their mind. For successfully changing your "Argumate's" mind, the user will gain "braincells" that will serve no purpose like Reddit "karma".
- However for the public debates, users must opt-in and get selected to become their side's Public Representative. For each debate topic, there will be 2 public debates for a total of 6 total public debates (6 Public Representatives from each side) every week (1 public debate for 6 days out of the week). From the viewers of these debates, Argumate will take an equal numbers of users from each side to vote for which side won that debate and at the end of the 2nd public debate for each debate topic, we will reveal with side has won by the total # of votes.
- Extra addition of a public chat that all users can chat in with their background color being in their side's color. There will be 3 different chats for each debate topic.
How we built it
We created a React web app that handled data from a Firebase cloud storage. The sign-in and oauth were handled by Firebase. We created individual chat rooms to manage messaging with others, ways to view chats, and automatically assign users to a side.
Challenges we ran into
We were originally going to implement a video call feature, but we ran into lots of issues regarding data streaming and formatting the user videos.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Real-time chat rooms and design of the front-end.
What we learned
WebRTC and Socket.io, Firebase and mUI
What's next for Argumate
We want to implement live video broadcasting for the public debates and possibly for private 1-on-1's if both parties agree. Also our team was thinking of adding reactions that the viewers of the public debate can send on-screen.
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