AntiScroll (beginner project)

promo
example

AntiScroll

Inspiration

Ever since the pandemic, my dad has gotten more and more depressed. Why? Because he's constantly scrolling through negative news and sad articles about the state of the world. Yes, it's important to stay informed, but there comes a point where doomscrolling is just harmful.

The National Institute of Health says that doomscrolling is a "vicious cycle" and can cause "increased feelings of depression and anxiety" like I've experiences with my dad. So, I wanted to create a simple solution to all this negative news.

What it does

AntiScroll processes Google News headlines to check whether or not they will be upsetting to the reeader. If an article is found to be harmful, it will be blocked and the reader will be spared from being sad.

How we built it

I used JavaScript and ParallelDots, an emotion analysis library, to determine the happiness level of the headline.

Challenges I ran into

As a newcomer, working with the Google API was really difficult, and there was not much guidance. I also had a lot of trouble with extracting the headlines and had to spend multiple hours on Stack Overflow. Additionally, I am not that experienced at JavaScript, so creating a working extension was a great learning experience.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud that I was able to put together a functional app in less than two days with my limited prior experience of JavaScript and working with APIs.

What's next for AntiScroll

I would like to possibly incorporate machine learning to tailor news blocking to specific user's needs. Also, I might try to make this work on Twitter, because my dad gets a lot of news from there.