This is against the Show HN rules from what i can see:
> If your work isn't ready for users to try out, please don't do a Show HN. Once it's ready, come back and do it then. Don't post landing pages or fundraisers.
I didn’t know that! I really wanted to know if people are interested in that type of product or not, the app is almost ready, actually I’m in beta testing step
It's okay, we all miss these guidelines from time to time but if you wanted to know if people are interested in that type of product or not before launch, you can join the monthly discussion "Ask HN: What are you working on?" [1]. If the HN community is interested in your idea, you will get a lot of feedback/questions to validate your concept.
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. Apart from all the criticism, this is what Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn got right from the start. For their intended audiences, it is either useful or fun to be on their platforms.
I don't see much added value for most arXiv extensions, except for SemanticScholar [1], which might have been lucky being one of the first.
> My own reason is .. maybe not possible to hit on research papers.
I think fancy people with appropriate credentials and .edu emails are all using openreview? So the audience is what, the unwashed masses who also happen to be doing some light reading at the bleeding edge of knowledge? Surely there are dozens of us I tell you, dozens! =P But yeah, maybe not enough to sustain a social network.
Never heard of alphaxiv, will try. I would also love for this to work, probably not willing to risk slogging through science twitter/bluesky/mastodon. Honestly HN would be the obvious place if it would add a pretty simple tagging system as most of the people interested are probably already here. I don't think we'll see that, because if we had filters no one would go to the front page, and that'd be a bad thing for certain interests.
Personally, I think social media and academic publishing timescales, rewards and social conventions don't match very well. Social networking feels transient and impersonal. I would like to take some time to form my opinion about a paper, not jump in with a post. Maybe some comment box would be ok to write a couple of nice things about a paper, but it doesn't feel the place to write harsh criticism or have complex discussion where things could be misunderstood. Rather than write in the public record, if I think the paper has a deep flaw I would prefer to contact the authors first. This can be followed up by discussions in your own papers. Others may have different opinions, of course.
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 appreciate those things are mentioned front and centre, because it reveals the mindset and goals of the author, which is a useful signal. Depending on the person that signal either means “give it to me now” or “I’m going to stay far far away from this”, but either way it’s useful to know.
There are plenty of reasons to not use Twitter which are unrelated to AI. And there certainly are people on Mastodon who are so into LLMs, it’s all they post about.
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 I don't understand about these specialized social networks, that obviously won't exist in a few months as they won't get traction, is why not just use the existing social networks?
Instead of some LinkedIn / TikTok / Facebook / Insta for X, create a group or channel in an existing network. Create a subreddit, or Facebook group or telegram channel. There are a number of existing social networks that are good at creating sub-communities. I don't want to join another social media platform.
Because many people, especially here, hate for various reasons the established social networks?
They are ad financed, clickbait driven "engangement" machines, that are designed to make people addictive and do not respect their users at all.
So TikTok for scientific papers already makes me not want to engage with the concept. But a social network with a focus on science is something I am interested. But the base would need to be solid. Where I can trust that they do not sell out to some ad network in 2 months after they established some users.
Because you don’t control the existing social network, meaning you can’t exploit and profit from the users in a group¹, which is the whole point of making a digital social networks².
¹ And if you do find a way, the parent network will simply eat you up.
I cannot tolerate comments like this one. I’m aware of what was the NFT shit stuff, if you check my art stuff you can find that are just wallpapers made with processing without any profit but made just because I like art in every form. Second, I actually do not have any profit idea, maybe in the future some tinder style card banner for ads, obv not now that I have just a POC.
I think the AI portion is not just something that ought have a toggle, but it should not be part of the platform.
Somewhat recently, the ACM (one of the premier publishers for computer science) integrated AI-generated summaries for all papers, and it made these summaries appear in place of author-written abstracts; to find the abstract, users had to use a toggle. The ACM argued that this was a benefit. After significant community pushback, the ACM has swapped things: author-written abstracts now appear first, but users are still offered a toggle to access AI-generated summaries instead.
As highlighted by professor Anil Madhavapeddy [1], the AI summaries are often factually incorrect, sometimes obviously, but often subtly. This sentiment was corroborated by numerous colleagues of mine less publicly: they checked the AI-generated summaries of their own papers, and for almost every paper were able to identify at least one factually incorrect or significantly misleading statement.
Some people argue that AI-generated summaries help to democratize academia; I think instead they are democratizing misunderstanding. The models fundamentally lack the capacity to "understand" when what they say is wrong or misleading. It is not uncommon that I have students in office hours with severe misgivings about our course material because they asked an LLM some innocuous question to which they thought surely the LLM would generate an accurate response. The course material is, of course, drawn from various sources, so the LLM ought be fairly likely to generate accurate responses. In contrast, a publication is often (or, by definition in my field, necessarily) introducing novel conclusions; this means that the LLM is less likely to generate an accurate summary for a paper than for course materials, and the course material summaries are already problematic enough, so I think applying this to research is just a bad move.
I understand the appeal. I understand how liberating it must feel to someone to get to "talk to" a paper to seek greater understanding. But if you already don't know enough about the material that this is useful, you also don't know enough to know when the responses are subtly incorrect, and I think this completely undermines the purpose of publication in the first place.
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.
Extremely interesting concept. I think it will be maybe hard to get a user base due to the scientific community itself not completely being "tik tok" people. Of course there are probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of researchers using social media but its a weird feeling of almost like mixing work with personal.
In general if you keep marketing and targeting the right audience i definitely see a potential here. Good luck!
wrong social network model for this domain. hard science are already loosing credibility for incremental/redundant publishing on fashionable topics - such network would accelerate this. indeed also agree that short attention does not fit to complex topics. if AI was the client attention span in time units is also not the right model, I found agents do not have a good sense of time required for their work.
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.
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.
careful there, you are saying blasphemerous things around these lands, that an algorithmic feed of content you dont follow can be more useful than a reverse chronological feed
Good idea. Right now I started with iOS because I wanted to experiment with the reading/saving flow and on-device features, but an accountless web preview would probably make sense, especially for HN.
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.
I think you’re right. The “TikTok” phrasing was useful shorthand for the interaction model and as provocation, but it also sends the wrong signal about the goal.
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..
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.
63 comments:
This is against the Show HN rules from what i can see:
> If your work isn't ready for users to try out, please don't do a Show HN. Once it's ready, come back and do it then. Don't post landing pages or fundraisers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
I didn’t know that! I really wanted to know if people are interested in that type of product or not, the app is almost ready, actually I’m in beta testing step
It's okay, we all miss these guidelines from time to time but if you wanted to know if people are interested in that type of product or not before launch, you can join the monthly discussion "Ask HN: What are you working on?" [1]. If the HN community is interested in your idea, you will get a lot of feedback/questions to validate your concept.
____________
1.(https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
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. Apart from all the criticism, this is what Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn got right from the start. For their intended audiences, it is either useful or fun to be on their platforms.
I don't see much added value for most arXiv extensions, except for SemanticScholar [1], which might have been lucky being one of the first.
[1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/
> My own reason is .. maybe not possible to hit on research papers.
I think fancy people with appropriate credentials and .edu emails are all using openreview? So the audience is what, the unwashed masses who also happen to be doing some light reading at the bleeding edge of knowledge? Surely there are dozens of us I tell you, dozens! =P But yeah, maybe not enough to sustain a social network.
Never heard of alphaxiv, will try. I would also love for this to work, probably not willing to risk slogging through science twitter/bluesky/mastodon. Honestly HN would be the obvious place if it would add a pretty simple tagging system as most of the people interested are probably already here. I don't think we'll see that, because if we had filters no one would go to the front page, and that'd be a bad thing for certain interests.
Personally, I think social media and academic publishing timescales, rewards and social conventions don't match very well. Social networking feels transient and impersonal. I would like to take some time to form my opinion about a paper, not jump in with a post. Maybe some comment box would be ok to write a couple of nice things about a paper, but it doesn't feel the place to write harsh criticism or have complex discussion where things could be misunderstood. Rather than write in the public record, if I think the paper has a deep flaw I would prefer to contact the authors first. This can be followed up by discussions in your own papers. Others may have different opinions, of course.
Scirate.com has been going since before 2010 and still active as far as I'm aware. Mostly used by quantum info folks though.
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 appreciate those things are mentioned front and centre, because it reveals the mindset and goals of the author, which is a useful signal. Depending on the person that signal either means “give it to me now” or “I’m going to stay far far away from this”, but either way it’s useful to know.
yeah, it's like seeing a Mastodon link instead of Twitter on a blog, you instantly know they hate everything AI
There are plenty of reasons to not use Twitter which are unrelated to AI. And there certainly are people on Mastodon who are so into LLMs, it’s all they post about.
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 I don't understand about these specialized social networks, that obviously won't exist in a few months as they won't get traction, is why not just use the existing social networks?
Instead of some LinkedIn / TikTok / Facebook / Insta for X, create a group or channel in an existing network. Create a subreddit, or Facebook group or telegram channel. There are a number of existing social networks that are good at creating sub-communities. I don't want to join another social media platform.
Because many people, especially here, hate for various reasons the established social networks?
They are ad financed, clickbait driven "engangement" machines, that are designed to make people addictive and do not respect their users at all.
So TikTok for scientific papers already makes me not want to engage with the concept. But a social network with a focus on science is something I am interested. But the base would need to be solid. Where I can trust that they do not sell out to some ad network in 2 months after they established some users.
> why not just use the existing social networks?
Because you don’t control the existing social network, meaning you can’t exploit and profit from the users in a group¹, which is the whole point of making a digital social networks².
¹ And if you do find a way, the parent network will simply eat you up.
² Outside of a few truly ideological non-profits.
> ² Outside of a few truly ideological non-profits.
So the question stays the same: why is this not just a Mastodon server?
[flagged]
I cannot tolerate comments like this one. I’m aware of what was the NFT shit stuff, if you check my art stuff you can find that are just wallpapers made with processing without any profit but made just because I like art in every form. Second, I actually do not have any profit idea, maybe in the future some tinder style card banner for ads, obv not now that I have just a POC.
How is this diferent from https://notebooklm.google.com?
I think the AI portion is not just something that ought have a toggle, but it should not be part of the platform.
Somewhat recently, the ACM (one of the premier publishers for computer science) integrated AI-generated summaries for all papers, and it made these summaries appear in place of author-written abstracts; to find the abstract, users had to use a toggle. The ACM argued that this was a benefit. After significant community pushback, the ACM has swapped things: author-written abstracts now appear first, but users are still offered a toggle to access AI-generated summaries instead.
As highlighted by professor Anil Madhavapeddy [1], the AI summaries are often factually incorrect, sometimes obviously, but often subtly. This sentiment was corroborated by numerous colleagues of mine less publicly: they checked the AI-generated summaries of their own papers, and for almost every paper were able to identify at least one factually incorrect or significantly misleading statement.
Some people argue that AI-generated summaries help to democratize academia; I think instead they are democratizing misunderstanding. The models fundamentally lack the capacity to "understand" when what they say is wrong or misleading. It is not uncommon that I have students in office hours with severe misgivings about our course material because they asked an LLM some innocuous question to which they thought surely the LLM would generate an accurate response. The course material is, of course, drawn from various sources, so the LLM ought be fairly likely to generate accurate responses. In contrast, a publication is often (or, by definition in my field, necessarily) introducing novel conclusions; this means that the LLM is less likely to generate an accurate summary for a paper than for course materials, and the course material summaries are already problematic enough, so I think applying this to research is just a bad move.
I understand the appeal. I understand how liberating it must feel to someone to get to "talk to" a paper to seek greater understanding. But if you already don't know enough about the material that this is useful, you also don't know enough to know when the responses are subtly incorrect, and I think this completely undermines the purpose of publication in the first place.
[1] https://anil.recoil.org/notes/acm-ai-recs
Wow. Cannot believe that the ACM did this. All hope is lost.
I would focus on the paper recommendation system more.
If paper recommendation system is strong and gives value, then it could be really useful for the scientific community.
Shameless plug: Have you tried https://papermatch.me ?
Would really appreciate your feedback!
Here I was really hoping the researchers would be dancing out their paper summaries, as they do on actual TikTok...
what does it mean for scientific papers?
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.
[flagged]
Extremely interesting concept. I think it will be maybe hard to get a user base due to the scientific community itself not completely being "tik tok" people. Of course there are probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of researchers using social media but its a weird feeling of almost like mixing work with personal.
In general if you keep marketing and targeting the right audience i definitely see a potential here. Good luck!
wrong social network model for this domain. hard science are already loosing credibility for incremental/redundant publishing on fashionable topics - such network would accelerate this. indeed also agree that short attention does not fit to complex topics. if AI was the client attention span in time units is also not the right model, I found agents do not have a good sense of time required for their work.
It's worth a shot, as long as this content is hand-curated, which seems impossible.
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.
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.
careful there, you are saying blasphemerous things around these lands, that an algorithmic feed of content you dont follow can be more useful than a reverse chronological feed
So it’s just a landing page…
Yeah, and things that can't be tried out are explicitly excluded by the Show HN rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
OP should come back once there's an actual product, assuming it ever gets past the email harvesting stage.
I'm intrigued. But can the AI part be turned off?
This is exactly the problem with science reporting. All things can go wrong like click bait, out of context conclusions etc will go wrong.
Crack cocaine but it strengthens the prefrontal cortex!
Didn't expect to see TikTok and scientific papers in the same sentence but it's somehow interesting
Insightful comment ahead:
Is the gravity set very high or am I getting too old to play Flappy Bird with Transformers?
Wow op, slick spam page, there will be many here who want to give you their email. Best show HN eva.
Accountless Web version?
Good idea. Right now I started with iOS because I wanted to experiment with the reading/saving flow and on-device features, but an accountless web preview would probably make sense, especially for HN.
Already "too many signups" at 13 votes, ruh roh
This looks amazing. I hope Android will be an option.
Windows 2000 works faster in my browser..
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.
(1) https://philippdubach.com/posts/rss-swipr-find-blogs-like-yo...
I think you’re right. The “TikTok” phrasing was useful shorthand for the interaction model and as provocation, but it also sends the wrong signal about the goal.
.
I think it's a cool idea. It could be great for discovering new papers in a fun way.
This is a bit like discovering punk rock for the first time and rolling your eyes and saying "yeah, we really need more rock"
No, it is more like "tiktok for punk rock discovery: find the most authentic punk rock in our new app".
Show HN: Shit, but for dinner
Yeah, I have an allergic reaction to tiktok being mixed up in any serious intellectual pursuit. :-)
Too funny to be AI-generated. Well done.
What if we make a paid substack for scientific papers and put all papers behind a paywall. Oh .. wait.
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..
Love this! Looking forward to trying it.
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)
Idea Looks really attractive to me too.
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.