#BeatTheAlgorithm is a demo campaign website made for the CS-C1180 - Verkkojulkaisemisen perusteet (roughly translating to: basics of web publishing) course held in Aalto University in the spring of 2023.
Its purpose is to serve as a wake-up call about one's social media habits, framing these in a new, larger, life-wide perspective via a short film and an interactive quiz calculating the percentage of life spent online and the difference between intentional and accidental social media usage in concrete terms, that hopefully gives the visitor some new insight about what they actually value about social media and what is just noise and procrastination.
The website is deployed at: https://beat-the-algorithm.netlify.app/
The website consists of three pages:
Home contains the landing page, that always adapts to fully cover the viewport, a few paragraphs trying to persuade the visitor to take part in the challenge, the campaign video and links to further reading.
About explains the purpose and rationale of the site and contains social media links.
Quiz has 2 questions about the visitor's demographics to determine their remaining life expectancy and 3 questions about their social media usage designed to make them reflect on the positives and negatives of social media and seeing how they are doing with respect to the time they consider healthy and productive.
Submitting the form visualizes the daily and lifewide average social media usage in a pie chart with sleep visualized in blue, productive and healthy social media usage in orange with the actual usage time exceeding it in red and the remaining waking time in green.
If the visitor's social media usage does not exceed their ideal for healthy and productive social media time, they get a message congratulating them for being on top of their social media usage, whereas if they fail to stay within the goal, they get a message warning them about the months and years that the red slice compounds to if they live up to their life expectancy. For example, for a 20-year-old Finn, an hour a day of social media time exceeding their goal compounds to 1 year and 9 months of unwanted social media usage during their remaining life expectancy. This is supported by the numbers for remaining life expectancy in total as well as the portion of that actually spent awake, which is approximately only two thirds. Additionally, to help in evaluating the goal selected, percentages and their corresponding years and months for the goal and actual usage are displayed in the results as well.
To run the website on your local machine, you must have Node.js installed. After that, simply clone it onto
your computer, install the dependencies by running npm install in the project directory and run it using
npm start, which will start the localhost and display the website usually at http://localhost:3000/ by
default, which can be opened using any browser of your choice.