Content Catalyst

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Inspiration

Our main target content platform YouTube as it has over 2 billion monthly active users, making it the biggest streaming/content platform out there. This would result in a larger user base for us. YouTube content is mainly dominated by already-established users. It is harder every day for new channels to rise and stand out from the rest. This can lead to demotivation and cause a lot of people to stop their journey on YouTube. There may also be a financial cost to creating content for your channel which will not be recovered if one stops uploading content. This long journey can take months or even years and cause people to lose interest. This is why we decided to create Content Catalyst, a tool to award people for uploading more and more videos on the platform and continuing their grind of becoming big YouTubers. The tool provides different rewards based on the engagement users get on their videos causing them to create high-quality videos to reach and have a more engaging audience.

What it does

Content Catalyst gamifies the process of content creation by rewarding creators with in-game collectibles like ranks and points. Using our points system, we award points to creators' content. A content creator first logs in with Google, as we have integrated with YouTube and Google. As a creator logs in with Google, initially, they are required to also enter their YouTube channel ID. This is used by us, to link their channel with their Google account. We have sufficient authentication in place to check whether their channel is indeed, owned by the Google account they logged in. At this initial onboarding stage, we also calculate the total points they have, which is stored in the database. We calculate points according to our rudimentary points system. Everytime, there is a change in the user's total points, we update it and accordingly update their ranking. Based on the number of points, we assign a rank to the creator. For instance, if the points are less than 100, they are unranked. If more than 100, they have a ranking of "Beginner". As they receive more engagement on their content, their points improve and so does their ranking.

How we built it

We built it using React.js as our frontend framework and we used Supabase to store user information such as points and YouTube channel ID. We also used Auth0 for a seamless user authentication experience and the social login.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we ran into a few issues with Auth0, particularly persisting the refresh token. This prompted us to the Auth0 community forum, which was instrumental in solving the issue. We stumbled upon our solution over there. For any beginners out there working with Auth0, we certainly recommend using the Auth0 community forum, as it is very useful in solving common issues. Later in the hackathon, we ran into an issue with the YouTube API, and had to find a solution where we were able to search channels by their id without having a YouTube API Key.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of being able to complete our entire project within the time frame of the hackathon. This includes the entire Auth0 integration, as well as the Supabase integration. Planning and managing the entire project, was a challenge, but accomplishing it, for us, is certainly a matter of pride.

What we learned

We learnt a ton of new technologies and techniques like react integration with Auth0, serverless database storage with Supabase and using hooks and functional components with React.js. This hackathon was an exciting opportunity for us to demonstrate our learning from all previous hacks, and learn a bunch of new technologies, that will equip us for our next hackathon.

What's next for Content Catalyst

In the future, we would like to add a global leaderboard for all creators to participate in, and see their global rank with respect to their tiers. We can also launch contests on the platform, where creators have to create content based on some theme, and according to the engagement of their content, they get points and rewards. We can track this engagement using hashtags, where content specified by some hashtag will get points accordingly.