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What 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

What 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.

kashnote 4y ago
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!
- N3cr0ph4g1st 4y ago
  loll if you're not willing to do whatever it takes to promote your site and get engagement it'll die. I also dislike Twitter, but it is the perfect place to promote this.
- JieJie 4y ago
  An RSS feed would be helpful. That's how I follow Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com/rss).
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  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.
- joenot443 4y ago
  I think it might be worth partnering with someone who specializes in community building, then. The easy part is what you’ve done already. It truly looks awesome, but unfortunately it really is just the beginning. The much, much harder part is getting people to keep coming back and contributing themselves. There’s nothing technologically impressive about HN, the reason we’re here is because everyone’s already here, and the reason everyone’s already here YC and Paul Graham. Without huge names like that behind your project, you’re going to be growth hacking and bootstrapping.
  - pkdpic 4y ago
    > I think it might be worth partnering with someone who specializes in community building, then. Curious if anyone has any concrete experience on what this step looks like / how thats done. And for whatever it's worth I agree on some level that building the site is the easy part but I still remember when building a functioning well-designed web app seemed daunting / impossibly complex and it still is to most people. A beautiful working site like this is always an achievement. [speaking to myself mostly] I think anyone that can build social platform alternatives like this should as often as possible to create a richer ecosystem less in danger of being dominated by abusive / destructive monopolies. Were still in the car brand phase of social platform options when it seems like we could be at a artisan coffee roasters level. I want to find my next social media app at a farmers market.
- akdom 4y ago
  +1 to @sillysaurusx's comment. I'd like to add on a recommendation to read The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen. It goes into the trials and tribulations of creating a product dependent on network effects. More than just a problem of no longer having an "artificial" influx of users via HN, you will need to figure out how to build what Chen calls an "Atomic Network" of users who are self-sustaining on the platform. The first step to that end will be figuring out how to attract the "hard side" of the network (i.e. people who find good papers and post them). What keeps them coming back? I'd highly recommend considering what the smallest network of users would be that could sustain something like Paperlist and what features they might want. Some questions that might be helpful to get started: * What incentive does a given user have to return to the site? * How would a user be drawn back to the site, e.g. RSS, notifications, etc.? * What incentive does a user have to contribute to Paperlist over submitting to HN, reddit, etc.? * How do you attract a new user the to site? Put another way: how do you increase the "virality" of Paperlist? E.g. why would someone link to Paperlist today instead of Arxiv? I hope this is helpful.
ajmurmann 4y ago
I wonder if bots that post about the trending papers on Twitter, Mastodon etc. can drive more consistent engagement. I will forget to visit this website, bit would definitely subscriber to the bot and likely end up browsing more of the side when I visit after having followed the social media post.
paulpauper 4y ago
What 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. Yeah front page on HN = high bounce rate. You need more to keep 'em coming back. I don't think this is that good of an idea, imho. arXiv and SSRN already do this. There are no shortage of paper syndication and aggregation services.
- wingerlang 4y ago
  > I don't think this is that good of an idea, imho I don't think it necessarily is a bad idea either. The problem is that you can't just make a simple looking website and call it a "HN for X". HN is nothing without the users and comments. So if the idea is to bring the research community to the site itself, the idea is.. good? At least in theory. It might still be impossible in practice.
zrkrlc 4y ago
A bit crass these days, but this is probably where Reddit-style fake accounts will probably shine. Maybe a mix of manual work + judiciously crafted chatGPT prompts?
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  I've thought about fine tuning a GPT using stylometry to sound like specific HN users. You'd have to do that if you want it to succeed, since otherwise it'll all sound same-y.
hyperthesis 4y ago
A narrower, niche focus helps, because easier to get a higher concentration on fewer things. Then you want a natural way to expand the focus. It was easier for reddit and HN, without reddit and HN to compete with.
- mariusor 4y ago
  That's not entirely true. Reddit when was launched was the underdog to a very popular Digg, and maybe to a less extent Slashdot. Reddit gained popularity when Digg updated their interface to something that most users disliked strongly. And HN had reddit as a competitor right from the start - maybe not the same reddit of today, but still notable.
holler 4y ago
100%, my experience getting to front page of HN twice with https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im I found Twitter to not be a great place to recruit new users, granted it was probably partly because I was using the official account for the site, not a personal account with my face, and the nature of "real-time" means w/o coordinated events where people show up at the same time, the bounce rate is high. What was the hn clone you built? Still working on community site(s)?
DoctorOetker 4y ago
Did your platform permit LaTeX in comments? To get profound discussions, the discussions need to be able to delve towards the fundamentals, i.e. towards both mathematics on one hand and the basic sciences on the other (physics, chemistry). I yearn for a HN for scientific papers, and while there are often comments by actual physicists, mathematicians, chemists,... on HN, there is a lot of "science fan boy" noise. If actual mathematicians and scientists can not use the notation systems they are familiar with, the platform is doomed to word salad. Growing up I once saw a piece of graffiti in the city's dead center, it read either: "Every system creates the bullshit it deserves" or: "Every system deserves the bullshit it creates" I can't remember which exactly.

kashnote 4y ago

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!

N3cr0ph4g1st 4y ago
loll if you're not willing to do whatever it takes to promote your site and get engagement it'll die. I also dislike Twitter, but it is the perfect place to promote this.
JieJie 4y ago
An RSS feed would be helpful. That's how I follow Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com/rss).
sillysaurusx 4y ago
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.
joenot443 4y ago
I think it might be worth partnering with someone who specializes in community building, then. The easy part is what you’ve done already. It truly looks awesome, but unfortunately it really is just the beginning. The much, much harder part is getting people to keep coming back and contributing themselves. There’s nothing technologically impressive about HN, the reason we’re here is because everyone’s already here, and the reason everyone’s already here YC and Paul Graham. Without huge names like that behind your project, you’re going to be growth hacking and bootstrapping.
- pkdpic 4y ago
  > I think it might be worth partnering with someone who specializes in community building, then. Curious if anyone has any concrete experience on what this step looks like / how thats done. And for whatever it's worth I agree on some level that building the site is the easy part but I still remember when building a functioning well-designed web app seemed daunting / impossibly complex and it still is to most people. A beautiful working site like this is always an achievement. [speaking to myself mostly] I think anyone that can build social platform alternatives like this should as often as possible to create a richer ecosystem less in danger of being dominated by abusive / destructive monopolies. Were still in the car brand phase of social platform options when it seems like we could be at a artisan coffee roasters level. I want to find my next social media app at a farmers market.
akdom 4y ago
+1 to @sillysaurusx's comment. I'd like to add on a recommendation to read The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen. It goes into the trials and tribulations of creating a product dependent on network effects. More than just a problem of no longer having an "artificial" influx of users via HN, you will need to figure out how to build what Chen calls an "Atomic Network" of users who are self-sustaining on the platform. The first step to that end will be figuring out how to attract the "hard side" of the network (i.e. people who find good papers and post them). What keeps them coming back? I'd highly recommend considering what the smallest network of users would be that could sustain something like Paperlist and what features they might want. Some questions that might be helpful to get started: * What incentive does a given user have to return to the site? * How would a user be drawn back to the site, e.g. RSS, notifications, etc.? * What incentive does a user have to contribute to Paperlist over submitting to HN, reddit, etc.? * How do you attract a new user the to site? Put another way: how do you increase the "virality" of Paperlist? E.g. why would someone link to Paperlist today instead of Arxiv? I hope this is helpful.

ajmurmann 4y ago

I wonder if bots that post about the trending papers on Twitter, Mastodon etc. can drive more consistent engagement. I will forget to visit this website, bit would definitely subscriber to the bot and likely end up browsing more of the side when I visit after having followed the social media post.

paulpauper 4y ago

What 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. Yeah front page on HN = high bounce rate. You need more to keep 'em coming back. I don't think this is that good of an idea, imho. arXiv and SSRN already do this. There are no shortage of paper syndication and aggregation services.

wingerlang 4y ago
> I don't think this is that good of an idea, imho I don't think it necessarily is a bad idea either. The problem is that you can't just make a simple looking website and call it a "HN for X". HN is nothing without the users and comments. So if the idea is to bring the research community to the site itself, the idea is.. good? At least in theory. It might still be impossible in practice.

zrkrlc 4y ago

A bit crass these days, but this is probably where Reddit-style fake accounts will probably shine. Maybe a mix of manual work + judiciously crafted chatGPT prompts?

sillysaurusx 4y ago
I've thought about fine tuning a GPT using stylometry to sound like specific HN users. You'd have to do that if you want it to succeed, since otherwise it'll all sound same-y.

hyperthesis 4y ago

A narrower, niche focus helps, because easier to get a higher concentration on fewer things. Then you want a natural way to expand the focus. It was easier for reddit and HN, without reddit and HN to compete with.

mariusor 4y ago
That's not entirely true. Reddit when was launched was the underdog to a very popular Digg, and maybe to a less extent Slashdot. Reddit gained popularity when Digg updated their interface to something that most users disliked strongly. And HN had reddit as a competitor right from the start - maybe not the same reddit of today, but still notable.

holler 4y ago

100%, my experience getting to front page of HN twice with https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im I found Twitter to not be a great place to recruit new users, granted it was probably partly because I was using the official account for the site, not a personal account with my face, and the nature of "real-time" means w/o coordinated events where people show up at the same time, the bounce rate is high. What was the hn clone you built? Still working on community site(s)?

DoctorOetker 4y ago

Did your platform permit LaTeX in comments? To get profound discussions, the discussions need to be able to delve towards the fundamentals, i.e. towards both mathematics on one hand and the basic sciences on the other (physics, chemistry). I yearn for a HN for scientific papers, and while there are often comments by actual physicists, mathematicians, chemists,... on HN, there is a lot of "science fan boy" noise. If actual mathematicians and scientists can not use the notation systems they are familiar with, the platform is doomed to word salad. Growing up I once saw a piece of graffiti in the city's dead center, it read either: "Every system creates the bullshit it deserves" or: "Every system deserves the bullshit it creates" I can't remember which exactly.