Snap Polls

SnapPolls - voice your opinions!

Inspiration

As college students, we engage in academic discourse, political debates, and arguments about our favorite dining halls all the time. We were interested in moving the light hearted nature of these discussions online, where we could reach the masses. A research paper pointed out that in discussions, more than 5 points muddle the debate and loses focus on the subject.

The issue with online debating forums is that they often devolve into toxic, non-effective arguments. We wanted to take the same principles from Snapchat of self-destructing posts to encourage hot takes, discussion without linking to your public persona, and pseudonymity. i.e. How many times has a Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube argument turned into a discussion about your grammar or your mom or your face?

How we built it

These days, almost everyone is on Snapchat. We wanted to take advantage of this platform to reach a large college population and make a really visually appealing way to engage in college discourse.

We used Snap Kit to make an interactive web application, OAuth and pseudonomymous Avatars. Users can sign in and quickly choose answer hot and trending questions and see where they stack up with other people through a virtual avatar - Bitmoji! Users can also find out their snap code to continue the conversation! Only the five most recent conversations stay online, keeping the conversation fresh and accessible for anyone to drop in or out. Simplicity makes our design widely applicable and scalable.

With Snapchat’s Snap Kit SDK integrated, our app adds a dose of personal touch and creativity, while keeping things fun, friendly, and accessible. The modern React.JS library makes our web application highly dynamic, responsive, and scalable. Behind the scenes, our app integrates Heroku, Node.js and Firebase.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are all freshmen and beginner hackathoners, and the Snap Kit SDK had 3 pages of documentation and there have only been 1 other web app ever.

Despite having little experience in React and web applications, we were able to learn so much about React, Firebase, and various API's that serves to engage diverse ideas and opinions to help people grow on the college campus in one weekend.

What we learned

We learned so much react.js, node.js and how to make engaging products that people would use. Crafting an addicting user experience from allowing for Snapchat login that most have to intuitive design, we were able to figure out how people engage in discussion. We learned Firebase from scratch, but it was easy to use.

Much of what was difficult was the Snap Kit. Creating the OAuth2 with the Snap Log In kit was incredibly challenging on a webapp because Snapchat's web API was really limited and without examples. Similarly, the bitmoji picker wasn't conducive to static avatars that we could use. The API had no support for finding the snap code and we ended up having to hack it together by reverse engineering the API and using scraping for a link.

We have so many great ideas on where this could go.

What's next?

We are interested in adding more features to make the discourse a bit more interesting.

Similar to reddit, we want to make a discussion forum and add upvote/downvote buttons to make it more resistant or less resistant to being updated, so good points would stay around longer.

This would make the most popular ideas and opinions float to the top, however we also want to add features like Controversial and New to see different ideas and opinions.