Participants:
William Pan
Omar Raja
Pratik Ringshia
Aaron Sun
Abstract
Quality control and content generation are two key components for community-based websites. The traditional method of manual content curation using moderators does not scale in a way that is suitable for large-scale web apps. Certain online communities, such as Reddit or Digg, delegate part of this responsibility to users by allowing them to rate content up or down. This project explores a different way of letting users curate the content presented to each other while maintaining the anonymity of all users.
Theory
This study explores a different approach to the traditional process of content consumption on the internet. Instead of simply consuming quality content, a user is required to do two things as a prerequisite: create their own content and rate other’s existing content. These two actions in tandem will help create additional peer-reviewed content for the next user, whose consumption will result in the production of even more content. By having production be a byproduct of consumption, a self-sustaining cycle will be created. Although the figure below demonstrates the consumption/production process as generalized between two users, this relationship can be extrapolated to a whole network. This novel approach could alter the way user-based communities and internet media consumption are handled.
Implementation
Boost My Self-Esteem is a Ruby on Rails application running on a Heroku web server. The application makes use of several patterns, including factory pattern, active record, and model-view-controller.