People's Platform

Our project aims to transform the landscape of social media by shifting the power from advertisers to the community. Traditional social media platforms often prioritize advertiser-driven and tailored content, limiting free speech and content quality. We propose a solution that enables users to upvote and downvote content independently of the original social media platforms, utilizing blockchain technology for transparency and decentralization.

Moreover, individuals who wish to back and promote an open, free, and diverse media landscape can contribute to a fund dedicated to assisting content creators. This fund operates by monetizing content according to the ratio of upvotes to downvotes. This approach enables communities to provide both indirect and direct support to their preferred content creators and genres. Indirect support comes through the act of upvoting and downvoting, while direct support is achieved through financial contributions to the fund.

Onboarding is as easy as integrating a string into your content, our extension automatically detects your content and allows anyone to monetize it, without having to go through the hassle of setting up an account or connecting your wallet to some dApp.

LOG, DAY 1 - 13/11/23 "We are still discussing ideas, there are some good ideas, mostly ones that would enhance existing projects we started in other hackathons, but we are not really satisfied, we want something new!"

LOG, DAY 2 - 14/11/23 "A call in the early morning sealed the deal, we were discussing social networks when ads and advertiser driven content came up, especially the fact that youtubers are very unhappy with censorship by advertisers, and also the fact that reddit has a karma system which does not contribute to the user in any way, whereas in any other platform it would help the monetization of their content, there is also the topic of declining quality of online posts and content - We know now, we want to do something about censorship, and we want to allow everybody to monetize everything, as long as people love it!"

LOG, DAY 3 - 15/11/23 "It's time for our flights! Christian gets into his plane from Berlin, Sercan boarded from Düsseldorf and Ramazan from Antalya, we met up, and found our AirBnB".

LOG, DAY 4 - 16/11/23 "After CafeIstanbul, We discuss details about the inner workings, find a name for the "People's Platform Project", we figure out that we need at least 3 things for this, a Browser extension that hooks into compatible social media websites to display some kind of interface, a smart contract for managing funds, and a website that aggregates and promotes community-driven content, there is some discussion on employing an API to allow the "aggregator" website to display the "voted" content with more details, such as title, description, url and more. We decide we also need a management ui (webapp) to manage donations from users that will keep the system running. After hour-long heated discussions, we also go to see the Hagia Sophia and grab a bite. (it's now, we fill out this form and have created the (empty) repo in github!)"

Log: The Rest! In the remaining timeframe, it was basically impossible for us to keep a log like before, it's saturday night, sunday early morning, and we're trying to finalize, polish, create videos, create screenshots, go through the pitch, try to find errors.

We have reached a publishable prototype within the shortest possible timeframe for a team of 3 people, and we're proud to say that we tackled all problems with confidence and knowledge.

Sercan was the developer working on the WebApp (People's Picks Aggregator), writing his first ever plain-javascript/html/css application with api calls. He also wrote his first ever nodeJS server, set up WSL2 for development, learned the ins-and-outs of ethersJs v6, it was an absolute success and it was his first time on a hackathon, thank you for the opportunity!

Christian wrote a very efficient, small and intelligently designed smart contract to manage donations/contributions that go to the supporter pool, he designed the event-logs and calls, and helped sercan onboarding onto ethersJs calls, supporting both Sercan and Me on the way, being a very sophisticated and skilled man with lots of experience on the field!

Me, i'm Ramazan, i wrote the extension, my first ever chrome extension, lot's of first-time code here, it was interesting to figure out the security concept and work with the isolated environment of chrome extensions, a specific interesting task was passing calls from the extension to the installed metamask extension and vice-versa, basically finding a way to deal with the restrictions put onto developers by google. WIth the extension being the binding blue between the webapp and the smart contract, it was also an interesting communication-challenge, sometimes having to help the information exchange (not the digital ones!) between my little brother (Sercan) and Christian.

This night, Christian took over fine-tuning the entire UI of the WebApp and the Extension, as well as fine-tuning the smart contract and helping with documentation and filling out all these documents.

Sercan is currently working on the powerpoint, and i've been trying my hands on the presentational video (demo with explanation).

Thank you all for the opportunity, it certainly was different than other hackatons, we would be happy to join the next EthGlobal event!