karmatch

Love is better when it's dank. Swipe through memes to find your best match

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Inspiration

I brainstormed a ton of wild ideas for this hackathon, but Karmatch came from a personal itch. I’ve been on dating apps lately. Swiping through the same templated bios and shallow responses, I felt a gap which they couldn’t fill. Frustrated, I decided to build my own. The real spark hit during late-night Reddit doomscrolling, laughing at dumb memes and videos. No app checked for sense of humor, a huge miss given how much personality it reveals! That's when it struck me, why not build a dating app where memes spark connections! Reddit being the og meme vault, and its karma system inspired me to mix humor with romance and build a space for love through shared absurdity and not just polished selfies.

What it does

Karmatch serves users a weekly batch of top memes from pre-selected subreddits. You like or dislike each one, and if another user mirrors your pattern, your compatibility percentage climbs. This ratio is calculated for every user against each other, creating a unique match score. From there, you can peek at profiles and kick off chats with your meme soulmates.

How we built it

Karmatch runs as a web app, built with TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, guided by Devvit’s docs. Redis handles storage, keeping user data and meme votes quick to access. On the server side, we rigged up a PRAW bot-app to scrape Reddit’s freshest memes and pipe them into the app when called. The frontend’s a clean swipe interface while the backend churns through match logic. The setup keeps it lightweight and focused, pulling fresh content straight from the source.

Challenges we ran into

Early on, it wasn't just a meme app. I had bigger dreams: pulling content from opinion subs, picture threads, videos, comments, you name it! But it got too random, so i dialed back to just memes for clarity. The real nightmare was calculating the compatibility. Fetching each user’s data, comparing it against everyone else, and calculating match percentages! It was a data tangle that took serious debugging to smoothen out.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Proud to have nailed a fun, addictive experience that feels like Reddit but flirts like a dating app. And for a hackathon, pulling this off with no major crashes feels like a quiet victory :)

What we learned

I learned to keep my scope tight. My early 'everything' app idea was a lesson in focus. Wrestling with Redis and real-time calculations sharpened my backend skills.

What's next for karmatch

With more users, i’ll scale the meme pool. maybe sneak into more subs for variety. prolly cook up some meme packs so users can filter by vibe! Also hyped to drop a 'meme-off' mode where you and your match duke it out with your dankest picks.

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