The Other Day

A consumer social platform built in CS 278 (Social Computing). Each day, users answer a prompt, vote on yesterday's answers, and see the day-before-yesterday's leaderboard — hence "The Other Day". The delayed-feedback structure was an intentional design choice: it decouples the act of posting from the dopamine of immediate validation, making it harder to optimize for engagement-bait responses.

The project explores atomic network theory in practice — identifying a tight target demographic (18–25, social through tight friend groups) to solve the cold-start problem, framing the platform's social affordances around that demographic's existing humor and reference patterns.

Outcomes from initial testing were mixed in instructive ways: some users played the upvote game (pop-culture references chasing engagement), others stayed genuine despite no reward for doing so. The split surfaced exactly the design tension between competitive game-loop incentives and authentic self-expression — useful signal for the next iteration of the format.