I love this and wanted to build this - but https://www.alphaxiv.org/ already exists, and it gets no social action (hardly any papers have comments), so this makes me doubtful about this.
I am interested to hear if anyone knows why the format may not resonate with researchers or those reading papers in general?
My own reason is that to get value from a "social" site the number of interactions has to be high and of a fast speed for people to continue to engage, which is maybe not possible to hit on research papers.
People will not flock somewhere unless they sense some potential return on investment. If a website looks like it will disappear in a few months, it does not make sense for a user to invest time and effort into it.
You have to either invest a lot to get a critical mass to join your site, or make it extremely entertaining to be there from the start.
I could see the author using GenAI video creation to summarize and make short videos about each paper. I believe this format could do wonders for paper discovery - say choose "Computer science" and you could flip through 20 papers in a few minutes getting an idea of what research recently has been published.
Other formats are dense and require reading and internalizing the content
Just wanted to maybe make a light suggestions that, for marketing purposes, this really doesn't need any suggestion of TikTok and also might benefit from less heavy handed mentions of AI. I think it provides a real value proposition on its own without needing to rely on those two things to sell itself. They are pretty polarized terms at this point and I can sort of understand the initial revulsion from hearing TikTok next to scientific papers.
I think there is something to it. It seems that "TikTok" part is actually minimal, but it is bound, from purely marketing perspective, to drive some people here away. You might as well say something along the lines of Uber for bananas or "we pivot banana to AI and we are now Nutella AI"
I'm unsure that the tiktok model works because it's designed around fast, easy to consume content, whereas scientific papers require sitting down and really digesting the material. It's much easier to read dense text on a desktop/tablet over mobile. The times where I read arxiv on mobile, it's really just the abstract. If you summarize each abstract into concise bullet points that might be quite useful.
What make TikTok, well TikTok, is the frictionless experience.
When I opened the link, I expected to directly be shown the target content. If there's a login screen or any explanation to do, it should either be postponed or integrated into the experience.
I've enjoyed consuming information about interested research papers on instagram, and insta has been good at showing me more of such content. But I think a dedicated platform would be great too! It takes such scientific content creators lots of time to create a script, hook, include animations or other visual aids and also put the research in perspective with it's potential implications in the long terms. I am not sure if AI would be able to do a good job (yet).
My $0.02 try creating an AI powered science channel on YT or insta before spending time on creating a dedicated app.
In some ways I like the concept. Making interesting papers easier to find and easier to digest seems like a good thing.
But the popularity metrics and AI aspects seem like they will cause a bias towards certain types of papers, making potentially useful ones not get found.
Just what humanity needed: TikTok for scientific papers, with AI! I find myself looking up to the sky wishing for an asteroid to hit Earth on a daily basis, lately...
Is your negativity a knee-jerk reaction to TikTok and AI, or do you have a substantive criticism of the idea?
There are so many papers being written these days that it's difficult to find all the ones that are relevant to your work and interests. Likewise, there's a discoverability problem for authors who are not already well-known. Andrej Karpathy's arXiv Sanity site used to be a decent way of sifting through papers in some areas, but sadly it's been down for a while now.
I did the same thing as parent, but from the other end. I liked the start, but then I started going negative as I realized that the medium of 'presenting a lot structured information' and the medium of 'lets make it appealing to a visual person' do not have a lot of overlap. There is some, but there is a valid question of whether "TikTok, but for papers" is not just a bad way to advertise it to people reading papers, people on HN, but ALSO to people who consume TikTok.. it prepares a mediocre experience for all 3 groups.
It is an interesting mix though. I am not dismissing it outright. After all, I am driving ford lightning and kinda like ratty..
Seems like a cool idea, but also really niche. I could see a map tool as part of this video thingy where you can see word/phrase associations between adjacent papers as a similarity and connection search?
I like the idea. As others suggested it might be a good idea to drop the branding. Had the same considerations when I built a “Tinder” (1) for RSS Feeds. In the end it worked fine, if not better.
FYI I'm getting "Too many signups right now. Please try again in a few minutes." when trying to sign up to the waiting list. (congrats haha, but good to fix)
I hope it’s not purely ai generated, but who knows, maybe it is and it’s still interesting and informative. It could still be with such huge volume and high signal basis. Wish I’d thought of this actually.
I am interested to hear if anyone knows why the format may not resonate with researchers or those reading papers in general?
My own reason is that to get value from a "social" site the number of interactions has to be high and of a fast speed for people to continue to engage, which is maybe not possible to hit on research papers.
You have to either invest a lot to get a critical mass to join your site, or make it extremely entertaining to be there from the start.
Other formats are dense and require reading and internalizing the content
When I opened the link, I expected to directly be shown the target content. If there's a login screen or any explanation to do, it should either be postponed or integrated into the experience.
My $0.02 try creating an AI powered science channel on YT or insta before spending time on creating a dedicated app.
But the popularity metrics and AI aspects seem like they will cause a bias towards certain types of papers, making potentially useful ones not get found.
There are so many papers being written these days that it's difficult to find all the ones that are relevant to your work and interests. Likewise, there's a discoverability problem for authors who are not already well-known. Andrej Karpathy's arXiv Sanity site used to be a decent way of sifting through papers in some areas, but sadly it's been down for a while now.
It is an interesting mix though. I am not dismissing it outright. After all, I am driving ford lightning and kinda like ratty..
Is the gravity set very high or am I getting too old to play Flappy Bird with Transformers?
Seems like a cool idea, but also really niche. I could see a map tool as part of this video thingy where you can see word/phrase associations between adjacent papers as a similarity and connection search?
This looks amazing. I hope Android will be an option.
(1) https://philippdubach.com/posts/rss-swipr-find-blogs-like-yo...
FYI I'm getting "Too many signups right now. Please try again in a few minutes." when trying to sign up to the waiting list. (congrats haha, but good to fix)
I joined the waiting list.
I hope it’s not purely ai generated, but who knows, maybe it is and it’s still interesting and informative. It could still be with such huge volume and high signal basis. Wish I’d thought of this actually.