Inspiration
Doomscrolling has become an unavoidable part of modern life for many individuals. What often starts as a quick glance at a social media app can easily turn into hours of mindless scrolling. However, in our exploration of this phenomenon, we've identified several positive aspects of doomscrolling that can enrich our lives.
One significant benefit is its potential to help us discover and enjoy local events. By leveraging the content we encounter during our scrolling sessions, we can uncover exciting happenings in our communities that we might otherwise miss.
What it does
Our website harnesses the engaging elements of doomscrolling to create a vibrant social networking app designed to help people discover and share local events. By utilizing short-form vertical videos, our app offers a unique platform that transforms the act of scrolling into a positive and enriching experience. In a world where doomscrolling often leads to feelings of anxiety and disconnection, our app flips the narrative by providing a platform that inspires connection and exploration. By combining the addictive nature of short-form videos with a focus on community and local events, we empower users to transform their scrolling habits into meaningful social interactions and enriching experiences.
How we built it
We built our prototype of the social media app using React for the frontend and Flask for the backend. React allowed us to create a dynamic and engaging user interface, featuring a personalized event feed and short-form video integration, while Flask provided a robust API for user authentication and event management, ensuring seamless interaction between the frontend and backend. This combination enabled us to focus on fostering real-life connections through local events while maintaining an efficient and user-friendly experience.
Challenges we ran into
A number of problems stood in our way to making a successful final product, starting from the very first design step. To make a new style feed requires a lot of complexity, which needs to be managed due to the small time constraint. This means before we wrote any code, we had already finished our data model for our backend and database communication, our component tree for front end design, and data base schema, to try to avoid the majority of these issues. On the more nitty-gritty parts of the project, creating an endpoint capable of being repeatedly hit to fill a "feed" cache with new content that the sign-in user is yet to see, and yet is relevant to their profile, poses a unique challenge in and of itself. A full-blown recommendation algorithm falls out of scope when considering our time constraint, so again, we had to get creative with what simplifications we chose to make for our demo.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The entire application design required quite a bit of backend support to be able to effectively work, which in turn required combining a lot of different database tables with specific functions attached to specific endpoints. All-in-all, we were able to finish our backend incredibly seamlessly, mostly due to good planning in the initial stages about what specific questions our database needs to be able to effectively and efficiently answer. Our frontend design is also beautiful!.
What we learned
Always consider scale when starting a project, every component takes time, even building up a single login page needs enough time dedicated to it to handle the various states that a user can put the application in.
What's next for us?'
Continuing to add onto the social features, a message system would foster relationships built around events and seeing people in real life. Performance wise, it would be great to get smaller file sizes utilizing various compression techniques to speed up fetching each video on the feed.
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