Swat Saver

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  Photo of Alpha UI

Inspiration

Social media giants are at odds with their users. Users create valuable content, but today are served ads in return. Data is centralized, scrutinized and sold by tech companies, and users lose control, privacy and security.

Our app paves the way for a new era of distributed, secure and private, technology which actually pays its users for creating great content.

What it does

Our app allows users to post questions and threads where they get paid for likes on their content. We built on a freemium model, where all content is free, but premium users (with premium features) pay a monthly fee. Their monthly fee is then distributed to great content by the community, and the content that they specifically upvote. Our premium features include the ability to post bounties on questions for the community to answer, customize their web interface to be their own, and the ability to reward the creators they love.

As a result we can create a vibrant community of creators who are financially empowered to devote more to their craft - whatever that may be - and everyone benefits.

Swat Saver is also entirely distributed, built on the Etherium blockchain, such that there is no central authority snooping on your data while keeping it incredibly secure.

How we built it

We Swat Saver's core functionality is built on top of the Etherium blockchain. This enables us to built an entirely distributed app where there exists no central authority that can sell, or lose your data. We built custom smart contracts which are structured to enable payments to take place entirely autonomously. Every month premium user pays their monthly subscription fee from their Ether wallet, or they lose premium features. One month after each user pays their dues, their money is distributed across the top posts of the month and the posts that that user specifically upvoted.

The front end is built as a reactive app in Node.js with a JavaScript backend. However, we plan to transition our backend data storage to use a distributed file storage solution, like IPFS, in the future.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very happy with the excruciating attention we gave to the distributed, crypto-enabled structure of our app. Building a distributed app is, in many ways, completely unlike creating apps using a centralized server.

We're also excited about the loophole-free incentive structures that we were able to imagine to enable us to pay our users for their incredible content. Users are incentivized to become premium users with indispensable 'soft' features, while the core functionality of our app is open, free, and available to everyone.

What's next for Swat Saver

I'm positive that this will be the future of social media, and maybe it will be future iterations of our app which will grow to displace the current giants.

A primary goal of our app is to be 100% distributed, however, currently user info is stored in a local database - in much the same way current tech companies do. Yet, our system infrastructure is completely ready to be put on a distributed file storage system like IPFS, but we simply ran out of time to set up that database in this 12-hour hackathon.

Further future features are centered around improving the user experience of navigating the app.

Built With

• blockchain
• cryptocurrency
• ethereum-blockchain
• javascript
• node.js
• solidity