Snapchallenge

Challenges helping Charities, gamifying social media in healthy ways

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Inspiration

At a young age, I lost my first girlfriend to suicide, my grandmother, father, and grandfather to cancer, and struggled with bullying and social anxiety. Surviving my own mental health issues resulting from this, and learning to code, I have seen games like world of warcraft and social media sites like facebook and instagram abusing the vulnerabilities of humans - our egos and minds to further their own capital gains. I exploited the same tricks they used to become stronger physically and mentally, breaking the code on the psychology of identity and motivation in my own life, and wanted to create software that help communities come together and work on the things that truly matter. Instead of spending half their day posting selfies that don't further themselves or society in any real way.

What it does

Allows users to have a social profile showing challenges they've accepted and completed. Allows friends to incentivize them to complete these challenges by "liking" those things, where every "like" costs a trophy - which is a currency that will end up going to the charity that challenge sponsors. Users see number of trophies awarded total, instead of follower counts.

How I built it

Built in javascript and php with a custom framework similar to react originally, I've been rewriting it in react.

Challenges I ran into

Depression got in the way. I went through some very hard things and trouble worrying that bad challenges would be created and society could be hurt in ways by things like the tide pod challenge, or worse. I needed to make sure I understood psychology well before putting out anything that people could use to harm themselves or others. Working by yourself on a project like this and actually running into people that were motivated to see you fail instead of help you succeed was quite difficult. Just because you grow up doesn't mean the bullying stops.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud of not giving up. I struggled to make ends meet, took a few challenges such as living out of a car, renting my bedroom on airbnb and living on the couch, and am happy to share the results of some of these things and how they helped me grow.

What I learned

Programming in React is fun. It accomplishes all the stuff I was trying to accomplish with my own framework, and validated a lot of things I presented in javascript user groups that people didn't understand and actually mocked me for (inline styles and such). I learned a lot about AWS and video encoding, and am sure I still have a lot to learn about scaling the solution.

What's next for Snapchallenge

Will be releasing to app store soon and releasing a few tailored challenges hoping for marketing donations to make these well known before we'll open it up to where users, companies, and charities to create their own challenges.

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