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.
Show HN: TikTok but for scientific papers
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Re: Show HN: TikTok but for scientific papers
#32What 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.
Re: Show HN: TikTok but for scientific papers
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Re: Show HN: TikTok but for scientific papers
#34I 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 f…
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
Re: Show HN: TikTok but for scientific papers
#35Just 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…
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Re: Show HN: TikTok but for scientific papers
#36I 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 f…
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.
Re: Show HN: TikTok but for scientific papers
#37What 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.
Re: Show HN: TikTok but for scientific papers
#38Crack cocaine but it strengthens the prefrontal cortex!
Re: Show HN: TikTok but for scientific papers
#39What 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 c…
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.
Re: Show HN: TikTok but for scientific papers
#40I 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.