Phobonull
I have only been working on personal projects for my own convenience. I'm looking to get my first job in the industry, and I'll share what I can from the projects I built that I'm currently using or collecting dust.
I am currently at the point where you have a platform, or an app idea that just consumes all your thoughts, and it won’t stop until I put in the work.
Phobonull should be a social-media-like platform, with its main goal to bring understanding between conflicting demographics by allowing them to communicate their fears or concerns productively. This won’t probably solve their conflicts, but I hope it will let people see each other in a more positive light, so we can combat the spreading hate.
My head is racing with ideas right now, so this article will be a bit messy. Let’s start with how I came up with this idea.
Why?
I was contemplating existence, and the state of the world —as one does—, it’s bad, AI is making everything obsolete, we’re at late-stage capitalism, wars are still a thing, so why? Why, with all our smarts and advancement, can’t we figure this out?
Fear is my answer; fear can rise naturally and be weaponized for greed’s sake.
I’m aware it’s not the core reason, but it is the common symptom that people too often act upon, countries go to war, discrimination against minorities, I’d go as far as to say fear is the reason the world has borders to keep us apart.
But even getting rid of fear won’t stop wars and bad politics; they are caused by the greed and ego of those in power! That is true, but maybe it will take away their influence over us, and since fear is usually weaponized to distract us from the real problems, getting rid of it will promote real change and action!
How?
If there were a straightforward way of fixing this, it would’ve been solved already, but I can tell that many people are indeed aware of this. I’ve seen many content creators abandoning debate, which evidently doesn’t change people’s minds, and are simply trying to educate people, and Pobonull will be my way to contribute.
The website is simply a place where users can identify with any demographics, and can post their concerns about another demographic on that demographic’s page, and only those identifying with the asked demographic get to reply, no replies to other replies, and replies that answer considerably get higher visibility.
To avoid people using the platform for attacking each other instead of productively communicating, it will need heavy regulation that can still recognize the things that need to be said. It should range from simply telling the one posting a question to rephrase, to suspending accounts actively trying to ruin a demographic’s reputation, contribute to miscommunication, or spread hate and fear.
Details I want to mention
This ended up being more structured than I thought it’d be, can’t have that! Here are random thoughts I think about adding:
Users will have to decide on a maximum of 5 demographics to identify with.
All users will be forced to have “Human” as one of the demographics they identify with.
A mascot named M, who isn’t human, with her own account, and always neutral, maybe I’ll write her a story.
Needless to say, a mobile app.
M will be everywhere on the UI.
No, M will not be powered by AI. I want her to remain neutral when discussing machine rights.
M will angrily stare at the user if they try to skip reading the guidelines.
M’s main purpose will be to increase activity in the platform at the beginning, but ultimately, she should prove that even if we disagree, we don’t have to be divided.
The platform will end up depending on donations. I just don’t want to put up ads, so I’d appreciate the help.
Most likely open-source as well.
Demo is short for demographic from now on.
What Now?
I have it mostly planned out by now, so I’ll just get to work. I already know how to handle the backend, but the frontend will take some time, hopefully a month or so, and there’s also the mobile app, so maybe another month to have things up and running, at least on Android.
I also plan on making content out of the platform's most interesting questions, for promotion, like long-form videos on its goals and major updates, and short-form videos for highlighting interesting interactions on the platform.
