retronym

• GIF

Inspiration

Our inspiration comes from two main sources:

1. Nostalgia for the old internet. After seeing the "Retro" theme, we spent a lot of time looking through old websites, and we loved seeing the janky serif fonts, the tiled backgrounds, and the table-based formatting. It was refreshing to see a version of the internet that wasn't absolutely finetuned for the sake of UX.
2. The problem of addictive social media. Modern social media has millions put into its design, with one intention: to monopolize its users' time. We've both used tools that help us limit our screen time, so as we brainstormed for this hackathon, our minds went to this very real problem. Quickly searching "effects of social media addiction" shows how mentally damaging these addictive platforms can be, so any effort to deal with this issue can have very significant effects. ## What it does A "retronym" is a new name given to an old thing, when that old thing's previous name has since become outdated or associated with something else. Updating the meaning of something based on the context of everything that has happened since.

Our app gives a new face to social media. Our website lacks the addictive UI design that big companies have championed, trading shiny minimalist aesthetics to the clunky HTML of yesteryear. We combine Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube into one single feed, giving users one place to get their content. Normally this would be the key to some ultra-addictive monstrosity, but our app is designed to be a one-stop-shop for users to get their social media fix, so that the limits we set can affect users' usage across all of their apps. What limits do we set? First off, we limit time spent doomscrolling. When users scroll down, they have to wait a few seconds before generating new posts, time that their brains can spend becoming a little more aware of what they're doing. We also implement a reminder that tells users when they've been scrolling for a while. Finally, by the nature of our app's design, users' attention spans are less susceptible to these sites' powerful algorithms, because we don't display the exact content that these sites recommend their users.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was wrangling the OAuth for Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube. We spent a 3rd of the hackathon wrangling the Twitter API to find out that it had been quietly "downsized".

Built With

• express.js
• mongodb
• node.js
• react
• tailwind