Decentragram

Logo
Overview of the application
User Interface
Feed
Tipped Feed

Inspiration

Moving forward in the 21st century, monopolies in the digital space have proved to be highly profitable only for the companies rather than the creators. With the amount of time and energy that creators spend on the app, the returns are very low in comparison. These monopolies treat each and every piece of content very similarly and rewards the creator based on the number of eyeballs it attracts rather than the quality of the content they produce. The algorithmically curated feeds increase bias and polarization which produces an echo-chamber view of the world. With the entire core infrastructure centralized, downtime is a serious issue and we have been victims of this system for quite a while now.

What it does

To encounter all the above mentioned problems we have designed decentragram. The one of a kind social media app that rewards users based on the quality of content they produce. We don’t only limit their source of income here. We went a step ahead to add a tip feature that allows users to contribute directly to their favorite creator with the help of blockchain technology. With the entire system in advent, centralization is a thing of the past.

How we built it

The Decentralized application is built using truffle and ganache-cli. With the user-friendly interface, creators can post the content into the application by paying a small amount of ethers for confirming the transaction. After posting, the content can be viewed on the application and another interesting feature is tipping of content posted. People can directly tip their liked content where the ethers would directly go to the creator’s account.

Overall working of the system :

A frontend web client service is provided to all the content creators to post their contents.
Smart contracts are developed using solidity for successful creation, tipping and updating the content.
Injected wallet (metamask) is connected to the frontend source using web3.js.
All the details of the content have been stored in a distributed storage using IPFS.
User’s account will be updated after posting and tipping of content.
Content would be sorted on the basis of tipped ethers.

Challenges we ran into

Connecting react application with the smart contract.
Deployment of smart contract (due to different solidity versions).
Testing of the smart contract.

What we learned

Development and deploying smart contract
web3.js

What's next for Decentragram

NFT marketplace to acquire and share digital rights. To make the application scalable, we decided to create a subscription based model whose basic functionality would be as follows :

User agrees to ‘X’ tokens being remitted from his wallet every ‘Y’ time period by the company.
The user has the power to revoke consent at all times.
User consent is dependent on the availability of ‘X’ tokens.

Benefits for the users:

Subscription payment behavior is a well-known and widespread model. The user can opt out anytime and they can make a purchase decision very quickly.

Benefits for the Dapp team :

Confidence and long-term view into cash flow. Subscription services benefit platform founders by providing them with consistency in customers/subscribers, churn, conversion, and margin. Founders can focus on making users happy with service quality and user experience instead of focusing on the needs of speculators.