🎡 Caption Carnival 🎪: An Open-Source project
https://github.com/Koodos-Collective/CaptionCarnivalFinal/
By Hannah Guo & Sirat Baweja
Motivation
Since the beginning of the global pandemic lockdown, online communication platforms have been crucial to keeping people across the world remotely connected. Discord has since become the place for us to gather and connect. Each community on Discord is united by similar interests or by personal connections.
Meanwhile, another staple that kept us going is the memes. Piecing together elements of culture to form relatable quips that bring smaller groups or the entire internet together. r/memes, one of the most popular subreddit on Reddit, has garnered over 14.6 million subscribers since its conception in 2008 and saw an explosion during the pandemic. Memes are the fundamental unit of expression in today’s participatory culture - and sharing them has become an important ritual that helps us connect, create our own group identities, and trade cultural capital.Â
In the spirit of openness and a truly participatory process, we wanted to share our open-source project and we invite you to build on top of it (yes it’s a meme!): Caption Carnival.Â
What We Built
We decided to combine the connectivity of Discord with the act of making and sharing memes for our product drop. Our goal was to create a Discord bot that would facilitate a community event to connect and engage Discord users in a fun, interactive way.
Built using discord.js, Caption Carnival is a Discord bot that facilitates a community event to connect and engage Discord users in a fun, interactive way. It uses a role-playing premise where users can join the Carnival with unique ‘acts’ (the memes), while the entire bot is hosted by Cpt. Shon (which was meant to play on the word ‘caption,’ not a Star Trek reference).
Users can easily create their own memes based on the Caption Carnival Creator's template using a simple captioning command. We implemented the infrastructure for exporting to Imgur to ensure that the meme could be easily accessed and shared after creation.
The bot’s assignable 🤡 roles, automatic reactions, and fun captioning make the Caption Carnival an event not to be missed! The project can be downloaded and hosted with its full source code available on Github.
Happy meme-ing and tag us on Twitter if you build something cool @Koodos!