USC students develop app to foster positive campus culture

What does it take to build an iOS app with some 1,500 daily users from the ground up? Three very tired undergrads — and maybe some software know-how.

Meet Mist, one of the latest apps founded by a team of USC students. It’s a social media platform where users leave geo-tagged posts that are usually compliments for strangers on campus, and other users can then comment or direct message the author of that post.

Posters advertising the app appear regularly on campus, and many have probably walked by Adam Novak — a senior majoring in computer science and one of the app’s co-founders — holding a cardboard affirmation sign on the corner of Childs Way and Watt Way.

Originally, the founders intended for Mist to be a dating app, but that quickly changed after its launch.

“An overwhelming response that we received was that that’s actually not what USC students want — they don’t want another dating app,” said Kevin Sun, app co-founder and a senior majoring in computer science. “[They said] ‘We want a place where we can anonymously say kind things about other people and just make peoples’ days.’”

Since launching in late September, Mist has accumulated upwards of 650 total posts and 2,100 direct messages. The app is reminiscent of @usc.missedconnections, a popular campus Instagram account that posts screenshots of compliments similar to those on Mist, usually erring more on the romantic side.

Novak said the Instagram account was one of a few sources of inspiration for the app, and that the team at Mist wanted to build off of the “missed connections” concept with the geo-tagging, direct messaging and search features. When asked over Instagram, the missed connections account moderator said they hadn’t heard of the app before.

Posts on Mist — dubbed “Mists” — range from: “In case no one has told you today, you are an amazing person with a beautiful smile” to “i was minding my business walking up the stairs and saw the fattest roach” to “is 5.5in too small, too big, or just right?” to “swimmer girls hmu, i am a very good breaststroker.”

To moderate inappropriate content, Sun said that the team uses an AI algorithm that’s trained to spot hate speech and a Mist’s flag-to-like ratio; there’s also a degree of manual moderation done on the backend by the team members. 

Sun said the vast majority of Mists are “positive,” and that a “really small” number of them have been flagged for hate speech.

“Our strict line is something that’s disrespectful,” Sun said. “[Hate speech] does not have any place on our platform.”

As seen in the aforementioned “breaststroker” comment, though, Mists clearly aren’t always positive compliments for campus strangers.

“It’s tough,” Novak said of content moderation. “It’s not like the post has to necessarily uplift someone to be on the platform, and we do our best with the prompts to push people in the right direction.”

One of the app’s tabs offers new daily prompts for users to write Mists about things like “someone you passed on your way to class” or “someone who makes the world a better place.”

Sun, Novak and junior Sophie Shack — another of the app’s co-founders — each spend some 40 to 50 hours a week running and improving the app; immediately after an interview with the Daily Trojan, all three said they were headed back home for a nap.

“We don’t have any [target] numbers,” Sun said. “If one person posts a nice compliment to somebody else and that other person’s day is made, it was worth it … If it means making people believe that there are actually college students who are kind and not competitive, mission accomplished.”

The three said that they’re happy supporting the existing community of users — with no financial gain and no plans to scale the product — so long as there continues to be a “concentrated set of kind compliments” on the platform.

“We definitely are having discussions about [the future],” Shack said. “But in the end, I think we created something really amazing … We’ve been through a lot together these past couple of weeks and months, but I’m really happy with what we made.”