Sunnysideup - Newhacks2025

Inspiration

Reddit is an invaluable space for university students. It is a place where upper years and alumni pass down advice, share experiences, and offer guidance to those just starting. However, it’s not always sunshine and support. Amid all the helpful discussions are long, time-consuming posts and threads filled with negativity that can quietly drain motivation and worsen mental health. We were inspired to create Sunnysideup to make the Reddit experience more uplifting and efficient.

What it does

The extension and the website both create a Too Long; Didn’t Read (TL;DR) of the post to save time. Currently, on the website, a user can check how suitable the article is for users to read and provide brief alternative options on depression-related posts to prevent users from experiencing a negative experience. Right now, where it differs is in how the extension can create tldr’s for many posts at once, placing them over each post on Reddit, whereas the website can only take one at a time but provides more general advice.

How we built it

Frontend - We used the Google Gemini 2.5 extension to build our website's frontend with TypeScript. For the Chrome Extension, we have used HTML, CSS, and JS to connect with the backend

Backend - Similar to the frontend, we also used the Gemini 2.5 extension to build our website backend with TypeScript. For the Chrome Extension, we have used JSON files and JavaScript to get a better user experience

Challenges we ran into

We had a much harder time than we would have thought implementing the sentiment analysis feature on the extension for Gemini to return how negative a post was because we had issues dealing with the two separate Gemini functions on the backend, as the other one that made the tldrs interfered with the process of integrating the second. This led to that feature only being successfully implemented on our website, which we developed first.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud of learning to build both a website and a Chrome extension from scratch in under 24 hours, and of using Gemini 2.5 to address deep-rooted societal problems arising from the drawbacks of overextended social media use via vibe coding and prompt engineering.

What we learned

We learned how to integrate Google Gemini into a project and use its API to both analyze and summarize text. We also learned how to create an extension from scratch and how to build a website for it.

What's next for Sunnysideup - Newhacks2025

Our first goal would be to list the extension on the Chrome Web Store, but we weren’t able to do so because of the long wait times for Google to approve it for listing. Our second goal would be to add sentiment analysis to our Chrome extension, since we were already able to add it to our website accompanying the extension. We weren’t able to accomplish these goals due to a lack of time, but we can very easily implement them given the chance after the hackathon is finished.