alt Hacker NewsShow HN: TikTok but for scientific papers
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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.
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'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.
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.
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.
Here I was really hoping the researchers would be dancing out their paper summaries, as they do on actual TikTok...
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.
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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.
what does it mean for scientific papers?
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.
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.
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...
What if we make a paid substack for scientific papers and put all papers behind a paywall. Oh .. wait.
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Papel? Im guessing it's not Pope approved!
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?
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...
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)
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