u/Advanced-Net-6484

Hey everyone, a friend and I have been working on building an AI debate practice tool for high school students. It’s completely free. We did debate and high school and it got us into good colleges so we’re trying to proliferate the activity and have more people accessing high quality debate practice. It’s more than just debating with ChatGPT as we’ve implemented (1) an ensemble of two models that debate with each other before it debates the user so it can check the flow of a potential debate and (2) a RAG pipeline with some of the best debate speeches recorded for optimized performance and (3) outputs formatted to meet debate’s niches.

The problem we’ve encountered is that… it’s really hard to promote. Of the people who use our app, we see a lot of users returning daily to practice. We also have 100-200 users per month, which means there is at least some sort of value proposition. However, mods will delete it on places like r/debate or r/applyingtocollege since they think it’s just ChatGPT with a different interface. What are some avenues you’ve used to promote your app? We’ve been trying on reddit because the debate community seems most unified here but is fractured in other places (hard to find contacts) but we just can’t get past the mods 😵‍💫😵‍💫

Any help is greatly appreciated!

I'm a college debater right now, and debate was a big part of what got me into the school I go to. A few months ago, a few friends and I started building a debate practice tool called DebateLab, mostly because we all had the same experience of not having enough opportunities to hone our debate skills outside of (paid) coaching sessions.

The idea is pretty simple: you can debate against an AI opponent and get feedback on your speeches. We've been live for about four months now and have been getting a steady 100–200 users a month.

I'm posting here because with summer break coming up, I want to take this opportunity to make it into a genuinely useful debate companion for high schoolers. I want to know what's broken or missing. AI feedback can easily end up being generic fluff that sounds smart but doesn't actually help you improve, and we don't want to build that.

A couple things I'd really like to hear about:

• Does the AI opponent feel like a real round, or does it just feel like arguing with ChatGPT?
• Is the post-round feedback specific enough to actually change how you prep or perform?
• Would having specific debate formats help? E.g. simulating parli/LD

Any insight would be greatly, greatly appreciated!