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Show HN: I made Hacker News but for research papers
31–40 of 94 posts
Re: Show HN: I made Hacker News but for research papers
#32What you'll discover is that the moment this falls off the HN front page, your traffic goes to zero. You'll need to manually recruit users, every day, typically by going to wherever they are.
Twitter is your friend here. DM everyone you can, and keep checking in with them to see if they're getting value out of it.
My personal experience was that I showed up, was delighted to see so many relevant papers, but then lost interest due to zero discussion.
That doesn't mean that it's not interesting. It is. But when you're making a social network, you're fighting a massive amount of inertia. The default case is for no one to come.
Give us a reason to keep coming back, and we will.
FWIW I speak from experience, having spent a few years running an HN clone that eventually tapered off.
EDIT: Also, your upvote algorithm needs a bit of work. The most upvoted papers are currently hidden on the second page. And in fact, at this stage, pagination doesn't make a lot of sense -- just show all the submissions.
Re: Show HN: I made Hacker News but for research papers
#33This is so cool. Simple concept, clean interface. Nice job. I hope it takes off.
Re: Show HN: I made Hacker News but for research papers
#34What you'll discover is that the moment this falls off the HN front page, your traffic goes to zero. You'll need to manually recruit users, every day, typically by going to wherever they are. Twitter is your friend here. DM everyone you can, and keep checking in with them to see if they're getting value out of it. My personal experience was that I showed up, was delighted to see so many relevant papers, but then lost…
All good points. To be honest, I hate Twitter so I don't know if I'll be trying to share it on there, but I agree that promoting discussions is the way to go.
PS Fixed the voting algorithm (was using ASC instead of DESC). Probably needs more work but thanks for pointing it out!
Re: Show HN: I made Hacker News but for research papers
#35Suggestion: if/when this expands to include life science papers add an ‘in mice’ tag.
It’s frustrating to read amazing research paper titles only to find out it was done with mice.
Re: Show HN: I made Hacker News but for research papers
#36Filter tags would be very helpful.
Re: Show HN: I made Hacker News but for research papers
#37What you'll discover is that the moment this falls off the HN front page, your traffic goes to zero. You'll need to manually recruit users, every day, typically by going to wherever they are. Twitter is your friend here. DM everyone you can, and keep checking in with them to see if they're getting value out of it. My personal experience was that I showed up, was delighted to see so many relevant papers, but then lost…
All good points. To be honest, I hate Twitter so I don't know if I'll be trying to share it on there, but I agree that promoting discussions is the way to go. PS Fixed the voting algorithm (was using ASC instead of DESC). Probably needs more work but thanks for pointing it out!
An RSS feed would be helpful. That's how I follow Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com/rss).
Re: Show HN: I made Hacker News but for research papers
#38Cool idea! One of the great things about HN is the high quality discussion. Maybe you can think of some ways to bootstrap that? Like ask submitters to leave a micro review saying why the result is cool or something they learned or some way they applied the work? Ideally not just repeating the abstract
Re: Show HN: I made Hacker News but for research papers
#39What you'll discover is that the moment this falls off the HN front page, your traffic goes to zero. You'll need to manually recruit users, every day, typically by going to wherever they are. Twitter is your friend here. DM everyone you can, and keep checking in with them to see if they're getting value out of it. My personal experience was that I showed up, was delighted to see so many relevant papers, but then lost…
All good points. To be honest, I hate Twitter so I don't know if I'll be trying to share it on there, but I agree that promoting discussions is the way to go. PS Fixed the voting algorithm (was using ASC instead of DESC). Probably needs more work but thanks for pointing it out!
Yeah, the reason people keep coming back to HN is that there are different stories every day. That's the heart of its success. If you want this to succeed, you can't rely on simply sorting by asc, nor can you rely on community upvotes to do the work for you. You'll need to manually place papers on the front page, just like HN does (in its semi-automated-but-human-driven way).
And get ready for it being a slog. It's seriously soul-grinding to try to curate a collection of new things each day and see only a handful of people come. But you have to do it if you want to succeed long term; there's no other way. I was able to keep up with HN for about four months, before basically collapsing of exhaustion. Then traffic growth stopped, and never resumed.
Re: Show HN: I made Hacker News but for research papers
#40Would like to see a tag showing the subject of the paper. Many of the titles are not very descriptive.