Show HN: TikTok but for Scientific Papers

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!

So it’s just a landing page…

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

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.