Inspiration
While many platforms have cleaned up hateful conduct and have created an intuitive and clean experience, I repeatedly find it hard to find and connect with smaller communities and content creators. For example, trying to find Python programming videos only to get served JavaScript videos over and over again. Ultimately, many small communities are great places. Getting connected with fresh creators and communities offers more personal connection, more curated content, and ultimately more opportunities for creators to express themselves.
What it does
CommunityM8 connects users to a variety of communities and content creators on Discord, Youtube, Twitch, and Twitter. Simply input any topic, and receive a curated feed of communities and creators ranging in size from hundreds to millions of followers.
How we built it
The web app is built with the Flask framework for Python, and backend functionality uses Google Cloud's Youtube API, Twitter's API, and Selenium for headless browsing/SERPs.
Challenges I ran into
Twitter's API was frustrating to use, I've used it in the past and don't love its documentation. I spent a few hours messing around with it when I checked to see if Twitter users' pages were indexed on Google. They indeed were and responded very well to specific searches, better than Twitter itself in my opinion. Often an imperfect but consistent solution is better when a deadline is fast approaching. This was my first hackathon, so the general time management and brainstorming constraints definitely were challenging.
Accomplishments that I am proud of
About halfway I started second-guessing the idea, as I felt it was too basic. Ultimately though, I had a lot of fun and I'm pretty proud of it visually, as I abhor frontend development.
What we learned
I am generally an AWS user, but using Google Cloud was enjoyable on this project. I felt comfortable using it for the first time.
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