Reef Media

Reef Media: A trustworthy media platform that saves netizens countless hours by knowing the value of media prior to consuming it with AI-powered analysis tools and meritorious digital infrastructure.

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Inspiration

Being a first-generation American whose family emigrated from the former Soviet Union when it collapsed as political refugees, I understood the flaws of a single authority dictating what can and cannot be said. However, today we have the complete opposite where any information can reach the devices of millions regardless of its merit or reliability. After seeing stories of countless people dying from misinformation regarding supposed "Covid-19 treatments" on social media, I knew that I wanted to build the digital tools and infrastructure needed to empower any individual to know the value of media, regardless of format. I wanted to guarantee seamless access to the most trustworthy media, not whatever has the most money or sensationalism behind it.

What it does

How we built it

Reef Media relies on a complex technical stack including FastAPI application for managing our ML pipeline based on an ensemble model focused on objective media metrics like identifying logic fallacies, disproportionate amount of incendiary or vague rhetoric, and outdated or provably false information. I then with reverse-proxying via Nginx linked a custom-built API

Challenges we ran into

I encountered immense difficulty getting DNS proxying to work between my web app, API, and backend/machine learning pipeline. To overcome it, I leveraged AI models to assist in debugging and learning about how to establish a production-ready network to orchestrate my varying applications.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We officially went live about a week ago and while building this hackathon, our userbase increased by 15% to 225 users.

  • Began discussions with a small cybersecurity firm to establish a version of our technology for social engineering cyber security applications.

  • Completed all essentials for the frontend web app, refactored our pipeline to support our new web app built in React Native.

    What we learned

    During this hackathon, I learned a new framework called Next.js and how easy it is to scalably build stunning web apps without significant time commitments. I also learned the complexities of subnets and DNS management for production-level web applications.

What's next for Reef Media

  • Launching the official platform by the end of January '26.
  • Support for additional media formats including X, Bluesky, and stronger infographic support.
  • Converting our existing users into customers.
  • Capitalizing on the enterprise interest from the crypto and cybersecurity spaces in the meetings we have these next few weeks.
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