stoc

rot and scroll 2gether

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Inspiration

As introverted CS students, we spend hours every day rotting and scrolling on TikTok, Reddit, and all other kinds of feeds. It gets lonely, but sometimes we still just want to be braindead for a bit after a full day’s grind. We thought, what if we could peek into other people’s feeds instead of being stuck in our own bubbles? That motivated us to build stoc, a place where you can find buddies to rot together, or peek into what your friends are rotting through.

What it does

stoc lets you:

  • Automatically tracks and shares feeds in real time, across various social media platforms
  • Explore strangers’ feeds to discover fresh content
  • Subscribe to people's feeds you vibe with

How we built it

We built stoc with Windsurf, an AI coding IDE that allowed us to transform ideas into prototype conveniently and efficiently. It sped up development of boilerplate code and frontend features, saving us time to refine our prototype without getting stuck on low-level infrastructure.

Our tech stack:

  • Frontend:
    • React (TypeScript) with Vite, Chrome Extension (TypeScript/Webpack)
  • Backend:
    • Express.js + TypeScript, Prisma ORM
  • Database:
    • PostgreSQL, Supabase
  • APIs:
    • RESTful API, Chrome Extension APIs, Social media scraping (TikTok, Reddit)

Challenges we ran into

  • Cross-platform scraping: Each of the platforms to record feed (TikTok, Reddit, etc.) has unique DOM structures and sometimes anti-scraping measures. AI barely helps with web scraping. It involves lots of manual digging around.
  • Video and post embedding: Displaying different video and post formats and platform-specific content in a consistent and clean style required careful design.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Successfully scraping posts from multiple social media platforms
  • Real-time feed sharing with one-time link/QR code and subscription management
  • Unified design, integrate multiple social media platforms into one smooth scrolling experience

What we learned

  • Social media feed scraping techniques
  • Building a prototype with an AI IDE

What's next for stoc

  • Add support for more platforms such as YouTube and LinkedIn
  • Display insights and metrics
    • "user x is actively scrolling right now"
    • "x users are scrolling your feed right now"
    • user engagements on scrolled feeds (i.e. likes, comments)
    • daily screen time
  • Publish the extension for cross-device support
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