StorySwap

Inspiration

When I was scrolling through my feed, I realized that everything conformed to what I thought-- not because my opinions were inherently better than anyone else's-- because my social media feed was becoming what researchers call an "echo chamber." I came to this conclusion when I was scrolling on my friends phone, and disagreed heavily with what it was showing me. It was at this moment that I realized I was stuck in a media "echo chamber."

What it does

I built an app that purposely matches users with someone who disagrees. Users then engage in guided and AI moderated civil discourse so that they can understand each other's perspective. The goal of this platform is not to crown a video or loser, but rather it is so that people can understand other people's perspectives. This debate is then saved in an archive which can be accesseed by anyone to understand more perspectives.

How we built it

I built this website using z.ai's GLM models to moderate this platform. Most of the code is TypeScript, with trace amounts of other languages. You can see a full breakdown on our github. The data handling was done by SQLite, and the ui was built using radix and shadcn.

Challenges we ran into

It is uncomfortable to be in situations where you are actively disagreeing with someone. So, to improve user retention, we built lots of gamification features in hopes that users keep coming back

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am incredibly proud of the clean user experience and interface we were able to provide. The website looks polished and professional, with extensive gamification which allows users to easily find people to debate with, and the low friction-interface makes them bound to come back.

What we learned

I learned how to use many technologies, especially TypeScript. This is my first project with TS, and I am incredibly proud of it.

What's next for StorySwap

I will be deploying this very soon on a permanent url so that people can actually use this for civil discourse. I also plan to add an api which updates the topic daily using trending news, so stay tuned for updates!

Built With

• caddy
• css
• glm
• javascript
• next.js
• prisma
• radix
• shadcn
• sql
• typescript