Hello World!

An anonymous platform that spreads positivity by connecting people of similar interests on a communal and personal level.

The motivation for our project stems from our observation of the increasing mental health issues in Singapore, which has led to negativity and a lack of trust. According to a 2018 national survey, one in seven people in Singapore has experienced a mental health condition in their lifetime, with the top three being major depressive disorder, alcohol abuse and obsessive-compulsive disorder. What’s more, 95% of Gen Z respondents said that they were suffering from stress, anxiety and loneliness, with strong negative emotional impacts. And it is estimated that about 18% of Singapore’s youth live with depression. Though Singapore is increasing its counselling and therapy avenues, many are still facing its effects. Life in Singapore is notoriously hectic with a heavy workload and academic burden. Since the pressure from everyday life is accumulated and not periodically resolved, people may develop mental issues unconsciously. Even if people are able to identify their negative emotions, they may still underestimate the implications. Moreover, being the conservative society Singapore is, many are influenced by traditional oriental values to believe that individuals with mental illness should be ‘responsible’ for the cause of their mental illness. In this case, the negativity would come not only from the pressure source alone but also from family, friends or co-workers due to their judgement and lack of understanding. Without a fine development of social inclusion, people with mental health conditions may face more social stigma and potential discrimination. Fear of being rejected or treated differently by others and reluctance to seek help or treatment may lead them to a vicious circle.

These negative emotions and thoughts have led the dynamic of the entire society astray. There is an overall low level of trust among Singaporeans for others, with two-thirds of respondents to a study saying that they felt they had to be very careful when dealing with people, as opposed to feeling most people could be trusted. If this is left untackled, the foundations of harmony within Singapore would crumble because of Singapore’s very small yet multicultural society which depends heavily on social harmony. Sustaining and spreading positivity is becoming ever more crucial.

On a global scale, such phenomena only exacerbate. Many countries such as South Korea and China face much worse problems than Singapore, with a similar hectic lifestyle and less awareness of mental health issues. Moreover, mistrust across borders only deepens due to geopolitical, historical and racial problems.

The proliferation of social media and freedom of speech has led to society being unkind towards others when expressing their thoughts, making society even more divided and cold. Hence, platforms to reconcile these relationships are becoming ever more important.

Hello World! is a platform where users can pen down their thoughts to spread heartwarming messages to whoever comes across it and share the positive energy with as many as possible. 

Our app has 4 main stages. First, users will sign up for the app by choosing from a list of recommended tags that they identify themselves as. They would only be able to view posts from the tags they have chosen. If they wish to, they can opt to create new tags, which will be added after approval by the administrators.

Next, users can send messages to people with a specific combination of tags. A minimum number of tags are required such that the message can only reach at most 20% of all users to encourage more unique messages. These positive messages may include encouragement for students under academic stress or gratitude towards workers after a long toil.

Furthermore, the platform automatically recommends the messages to the user in the form of a bullet chat. Users could choose to like, reply or report them in case of inappropriate or sensitive content. The messages with high reception will appear first, depending on the personalised rankings every day. To foster positivity, We would also add features that encourage positivity in the platform. Users who are willing to send public messages will receive daily notifications for sharing positive thoughts with different groups of people. Meanwhile, those receiving many likes for their messages will receive rewards. Lastly, people can reply to those public messages they resonate with and initiate a private chat, forging bonds and new friendships. 

Below is the link to the pictures of home screen and chat function:

Pictures of homescreen and chat function

Our solution brings a variety of benefits to many groups of audiences, especially to those suffering from stress and mental health problems. To reach out to these people in society, we hope this platform can provide them with an outlet to relate to others and form a community that can support each other.

To begin with, our solution applies to the whole society to encourage socialisation and bonding. Socialisation online with different people can be the most effective way for people to get to know each other and understand their cultures, basically fostering their bondages. Those who have been seeking companionship may even find their lifetime soulmate. When people with similar traits gather together in certain communities, their emotions are always spread among them through words, and daily communication. Emotional Value, referring to the ability to spread positive sentiments to others and arouse such emotions, always plays an important role in enhancing and strengthening friendships. (of course, this app will help build friendships first) It provides a platform for people to radiate happiness and build a secure and nourishing online community to counter the proliferation of the toxic internet environment.

Meanwhile, if our solution achieves success in Singapore, our team shall launch the platform globally. In today’s modern world, people hold much prejudice and discrimination towards those of a different race or nationality, with little knowledge or appreciation of different groups of people, encouraging more interaction between people from diverse backgrounds. 

For those who are seeking the mind's solace and adequate spirit, this inclusive community can also be the best place for them to find inner peace. Hello World! can be a diary, a bot, or a silent and patient listener to all the emotions and feelings not worth telling people in reality. However, it is not just like a dating app as people might anticipate. Hello World! aims to build a platform where people of all ages, genders and personalities could get along with each other. No one here is judged based on their popularity, but just  their true selves, their experiences and sincere hearts. They could simply release stress by simply writing and reading the encouraging notes from others.

All four team members are from the Asian region with adequate knowledge of Singapore society and environment. From observing the internet atmosphere, we realise that in today’s VUCA world, not many people have the patience to slow down to self-reflect or even ask themselves what they want from hectic online socialising. Could true friendships be developed between people who do not dare to share their real feelings and values and beliefs? Too much controversy and vicious comments could occur. We thus think, is it possible to build a community where people from different backgrounds but with similar interests could bond together, but in a little more indirect, more time-consuming way? We believe that the connections between people can be very romantic in some ways. Being Gen Z ourselves, we have thought of ways to provide unknown friends with a place where they feel secure. They could also spread their positivity to even more users in the community, making somebody in another corner of the world motivated and delighted about their day of life. 

Our team is based in Singapore, a multiracial and multicultural society. This allows us to gain different perspectives from people with various backgrounds. In stage two of the implementation period, we aim to bond people together, not just within a certain group, but we want to explore the potential behind the connections between people - even if there are a myriad of lifestyles, cultures, values and beliefs. We designed the app to make it more of a place where people could share their innermost thoughts, encouraging people and being encouraged, regardless of their identities.

Meanwhile, every member of our team is equipped with special skills to contribute to our solution.

Huang Jing is our team leader and also the graphic designer. She proposed this idea which was further developed and discussed with other team members. Having participated in several case competitions before, she was quite familiar with the procedure of coming up with innovative ideas and applying problem-solving skills. With her interest towards arts and design, she is more than willing to take up the role of the graphic designer.

Junzhe is our researcher on technical details. He has participated in various computing activities and competitions with some understanding of app development and algorithms. He has researched the most suitable algorithms for our app.

Zhijing is the designer on our team and takes charge of the overall flow, video production and task assignment involving the entire project. As the mutual friend of all the members before our team formed, she knows everyone on our team well. This allows her to quickly help the members establish a good team relationship and assign work according to each person's areas of expertise.

Sharncee is in charge of communications in our team. She checks the proposal and makes sure that the ideas of our solution are accurately conveyed. Having a passion for the media and its power, she hopes to utilise her strengths to better the promotion of our application. 

Members of our team accessed the severity of the problem through conversations and interviews with family members and schoolmates, many of whom have expressed their loneliness and stress. Meanwhile, members of our team have collaborated with the Singapore Association for Mental Health in many volunteering projects, and have gained a much deeper understanding of the importance of social positivity.

Globally, due to the complicated geopolitical situation, the needs of the population are much more complicated and diversified, and we have not yet taken many measures to analyse. If stage 1 is a success, we will investigate the severity of negativity and mental health globally and pay particular attention to the effects of geopolitics and history on the relationship across nations.

Our solution is a unique platform that distinguishes itself from all other similar products with various innovative aspects.

To begin with, unlike almost all social media platforms, our solution only presents the positive side of the world. The balance between freedom of speech and harmony in the internet environment has always been a topic of heated debate, and our platform cleverly avoids this problem, as it intends to spread positivity and love. Hence, as mentioned above, extremely effective filtering of contents will be implemented to preserve the intention of the platform. We are fully aware that life is not always positive, but we hope our platform will remind people of the kindness and love of society when they are down.

Meanwhile, as a platform for socialisation, our platform takes an innovative balance between public and private conversations. For those public socialisation platforms such as Reddit, Quora or Discord, one may feel less personally engaged, as the messages on these platforms are for all users to see and reply to. On the other hand, introverts are uncomfortable chatting privately with strangers. On our platform, users will receive messages dedicated to them, with no pressure to reply. Thanks to this mechanism, our platform can surprise users, as they cannot anticipate what messages they will receive, or what replies they will receive from their previous messages.

Furthermore, unlike most socialisation platforms, the innovative design of our platform can protect users’ privacy. Users do provide their personal preferences and status in the form of ‘tags’ on the platform for a more personalised experience. However, thanks to the anonymous nature of the platform, those data will not be matched to users’ actual names or contact information, thus protecting users’ privacy.

As mentioned before, for those who are seeking the mind's solace and adequate spirit, this inclusive community can be the best place for them to find their inner peace. Hello World! can be a diary, a bot, or a silent and patient listener to all the emotions and feelings not worth telling people in reality. However, it is not just like a dating app as people might anticipate. Hello World! aims to build a platform where people of all ages, genders and personalities could come along with each other. No one here is attracted by any bonus merits of someone, but just by their true selves, their experiences and sincere hearts.

Our plan in the first stage is to reach out to at least ten thousand people online, directly and indirectly. Our main region of operation will be within Singapore, and publicising the neighbourhood communities by initiating activities could be one of the effective ways to attract more people. 

To achieve this goal, we will first release a beta version for small groups of users to try out the platform and accumulate some messages before public release. We will then increase our social media exposure by extracting some of the notes sent by the users and the stories behind them and making videos or posts to attract more people. By observing the patterns of internet users, people are likely attracted to or empathise with underdog or comeback stories, so we will selectively choose these types of messages. As our influence expands, we will also hold a storytelling competition on the platform. The contestants are required to write a short story using no more than 10 words, and send it to the group tagged ‘storytelling’ on the platform. The story needs not to be limited to any topic but has to be inspiring and encouraging positivity. We will be posting the stories selected by the finalists on both our social media accounts and our application for more exposure to the public. 

Our solution incorporates various technologies into a mobile app to guarantee the optimum experience for users.

To present users with the best messages recognised by the public while catering to their profile, we rank the messages presented in the app through three factors: the number of users addressed, the published time of the message, and the likes received. Messages dedicated to smaller groups of users, receiving a higher percentage of likes, and published recently will be ranked in front. Based on the Wilson Score confidence interval, our algorithm will add two more parameters into the formula that represent the percentage of total users addressed and the published time.

Our second core technology is active AI censorship with manual assistance. Given the anonymous nature of the platform, such technology is very crucial. To ensure a positive environment for the platform, not only do we need to censor those violent, erotic or harmful contents that are traditionally censored on all platforms, but we also need to avoid users from spreading negativity with contentious, sarcastic or critical messages. As such, beyond the report function available to all users and traditional filtering of sensitive words, our solution uses advanced NLP neural network models with supervised learning that filter out messages with controversial intentions, such as advertisements, controversial comments and even sarcasm. The AI model is trained from the database of manually reported messages and built upon NLP models that can analyse and understand sentences such as chat GPT. The suspected messages are then diverted for manual inspection.

We have not yet launched our solution. We aim to impact at least 10k people directly by engaging them to use the application.

Lack of financial resources would be the most challenging part for us since we are all students and might not be able to afford our planned publicity campaigns, competitions or other forms of publicity. This makes it difficult for us to attract more users or form a virtuous circle of new users in the community of our platform. Meanwhile, the current size of our team is small and we may need to recruit more members to maintain our platform on features such as manual censorship and tag approval.

We have not started our project, so N.A.

Three of us are currently full-time students in Dunman High School in Singapore and one is graduated from Dunman High School this year. 

Business model in Canva

Our primary method is the implementation of the Premium system. If users would like to upgrade their user experiences, they could choose to buy premium subscriptions to gain access to exclusive themes, decorations and gifts. Premium members are entitled to sending unlimited images, videos and audio per day. Non-premium members could still enjoy 10 chances of sending images, video and audio rather than just plain text messages. However, the premium can  open up more options for users to customise their home and private chat screen with new themes and decorations which demand payment for non-premium users. 

Meanwhile, users could choose to send gifts to another user in the chat tab. The price can vary from $1 to $999 and they can pay more to even customise their gifts, such as different appearances, colours and animations. There would still be a few gifts for users to have access to the gift system.

Furthermore, we will also gain revenue through advertising. Besides users paying for premium, they could also choose to watch at least 15 seconds of advertisements to get free chances of sending image/video/audio messages. We will be open to other businesses’ commercial advertisements and charge fees for this service. Of course, for the best experience for users, advertisements will not be too frequent.