LOL Hunt

Daily top chart for funny Youtube clips. Anyone can simply share and upvote videos, and user data is stored privately via Blockstack.

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Inspiration

American adults spend over 11 hours a day listening to, watching, reading or generally interacting with media (1). With an overwhelming amount of contents out there, our team wanted to create a funny video ranking chart that is curated and determined by the users around the world. Sit back, relax, and explore new channels, content creators, and various senses of humor!

What it does

LOL Hunt shows a daily ranking chart of the funniest Youtube clips. Anyone can share new videos or upvote existing videos on the chart. After subscribing to LOL Hunt's Newsletter, users will receive the top video of the day straight to their inbox.

How we built it

Front-end

Front-end code was written in Javascript using Facebook's React framework. We used its new Context API and hooks for state management. For user authentication and storage, we used Blockstack's Auth and Gaia Storage API. Whenever a user shares a new video or votes on a video, the information is saved privately on Gaia Storage.

Back-end

The back-end was built on Ruby on Rails framework (API mode) which is a light layer on the top of the PostgresSQL database to provide public ranking data to the website users. So we use separate data storage for the following:

  1. Users' activity (user info, voting/posting activity) data is saved privately on Gaia Storage by each client.
  2. Public data (video info, voting count) is saved on our server and clients can query through API calls.

We would also like guest users to participate in our community, so we validate the uniqueness of voting by using the hashed key of the browser footprint instead of validating the authentication status of each user.

Challenges we ran into

Since this platform is most meaningful when it has a substantial amount of users, getting initial traction for the platform was the biggest challenge. We were able to gain initial users by using other medium channels such as Product Hunt, Reviewhunt, and other blog channels.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

LOL Hunt was voted the #5 product of the day on Product Hunt!

What we learned

Blockstack provides an unbelievably simple authentication and storage API. Gaia Storage was perfect to use for LOL Hunt, since it involved only simple CRUD operations.

What's next for LOL Hunt

We hope to expand this video hunting platform to categories beyond funny videos. Users all around the world with common interests will be able to create their own subcategories and determine the daily rankings of related contents that are submitted on the channel. New users will be able to use this TV-like channel not only as a source to keep themselves entertained, but also as an easy way to dive into a new topic without a hassle.

[1] https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2018/time-flies-us-adults-now-spend-nearly-half-a-day-interacting-with-media/

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