Consumer social platform for short-form opinion polling with a credit economy
A PHP backend and native iOS app for a social opinion network — users publish polls, vote, comment and follow each other, backed by an automated content-release system that guarantees a fresh feed every day and a virtual credit economy funding paid promotion.
Social products live or die on content supply, and a polling network faces the sharpest version of that problem: user-generated content arrives unevenly and least of all when the platform most needs it, at launch and in quiet periods. A single feed wasn't enough either — different users wanted what people they follow are asking, what matches their interests, what's competitive, what they've already answered — and a virtual credit economy spent on votes, boosts and extensions had to hold up against real money moving through in-app purchase.
Rather than treating an empty feed as a marketing problem, built content supply into the platform itself: a managed content reservoir released on a daily schedule against configurable targets, with a release algorithm that adapts to reservoir depth and administrative ordering controls layered on top, so the feed always has a guaranteed floor regardless of user activity. Each feed variant — following, interests, participated, competitive, running, completed — was built as its own paginated endpoint with its own selection logic rather than one endpoint with a mode flag, so an expensive variant can be optimised without touching the others.
Every credit-consuming action validates cost and eligibility server-side before it commits, so the client can only ever ask what something costs rather than decide, and boost/extend promotion mechanics were built as request-accept-decline flows so the platform arbitrates paid visibility instead of just selling it. Video capture goes through server-side FFmpeg processing for transcoding and thumbnails, keeping output consistent across a device population outside my control.
The feed is never empty, because content supply doesn't depend on how active users happen to be that week. Multiple engagement loops — voting, results, statistics, comments, following, competitive formats — give users more than one reason to return, and two revenue paths coexist without gating any core functionality: advertising alongside optional paid promotion and credit purchases.
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