The problem Decentralised Public News Sharing Platform solves

The Motivation

In Today's world obtaining information and news barely takes any effort. In fact, we are often facing a level of information overload and find it hard to process all the news we hear on a day to day basis. This hinders our ability to validate the information we receive and distinguish news that is incorrect or that modern terms suggest Fake News.

We have come up with a Proof of concept solution to address the aforementioned as well as other issues.

Objectives

• Make unadultrated and unbiased news accesible to the masses
  • Users can
    • Post News
    • Access news
    • Report News
    • Share news
• Make news Decentralized
  • News cannot be influenced by any interested party
  • News is not controlled by a Central entity.
• Incentivize Good Information exchange
  • Users get compensated if the news they posted trends well.
  • Users are fined for spreading False information.
• Quantify the Quality of the news
  • The truth rating of news can be viewed by the masses.
  • Everyone can report any news that they believe is factually incorrect.

Challenges we ran into

The Barriers that had to be Broken

As it is the case with any Project we too came across quite a few challenges throughout the entire process. Be it the Design or the Ideation Phase, we had to rack our brains over numerous hurdles that needed to cleared, and of course there is the inevitable and mind-melting debugging. But as you can imagine, brainstorming as a group especially with your friends is an experience of its own.

Major Hurdles

The Major Hurdles we faced, but not limited to are as follows.

The Carrot and the stick
We needed a way to incentivize users in such a manner that they are demotivated to post false news and at the same time encourage them to go out of their way to report events occuring which may be informative to other users.

What is the Truth?
Figuring out how to evaluate the truthfulness of an article was and will always be the biggest concern when it comes to this project. We realized truth is not something that is easily quantified. This was the core functionality of our project when it comes to practicality.

Storing penalties and popularity
We had to figure out where to store both penalties as well as brownie points of users as it would not be effective to store them in the blockchain.So we decide to append our core functionality of the backend by also storing the points in MongoDB and accessing them via a NodeJS server.

Finally...
Inspite of facing and overcoming so many Barriers we still believe our project can improve to a great extent and we are excited to eveolve it into a much better version than how it is at the moment.