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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.

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.

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.