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Some unsolicited advice: If anything, your consistent users have a lot of ways to discuss papers: classrooms, sections, MOOCs, stack* questions, conferences, pr

by dkural 12y ago

Some unsolicited advice: If anything, your consistent users have a lot of ways to discuss papers: classrooms, sections, MOOCs, stack* questions, conferences, proceedings, editorial pages of journals, invited lectures, ... In fact, a large of what people who read & write papers do is share and discuss them. Another problem is, since your "social object" cannot maintain enough synchronous interaction, it becomes a dead social network. Not enough people will read & discuss the same paper at the same time. If you are going to fix one problem, this is it. # of papers or # registered users is not important, The only important metric is #time spent between me leaving a comment on the paper I'm currently reading & someone else liking, responding, etc. in a relevant way. Otherwise people have no reason to go there, it's an empty room. So suppose you restrict the papers. Then it starts looking a lot like a scientific journal with social features - which a lot of sci journals are also doing, without a lot of interaction going on (see comments sections of PLoS journals). As others commented - tough market. Try to elucidate a narrow user segment & journey using a model like "Crossing the Chasm".

alixander 12y ago
That's very useful advice, thank you. I wonder how I might further facilitate the discussion part of it. List of "unanswered questions" (taking advantage of the fact people like to help others in an intellectual setting, generally speaking) and having a "paper of the day" come to mind, among some other things. On that idea of narrowing user segment, I was initially of thinking for it to be just targeted for the "hacker" community (computer science, math, psychology articles seem pretty popular here), but I figure if that does happen it'll just happen naturally without restrictions/limitations.
- dkural 12y ago
  Both of your ideas really good - a 'paper of the day' or some other way of narrowing content so achieve fusion. hacker community is also a great focus, since there is a lot of first-adopters, willingness to use new things etc. Even more unsolicited advice: I would NOT assume it will happen naturally - in fact restriction is your best friend. Stackoverflow did not allow people to simply create new communities, it restricted this quite a bit. Even GitHub initially cultivated its roots in the Ruby community, which then spread to adjacent communities. Likewise many communities delineate borders and delete user content. Stackoverflow likes concrete questions, for instance. Tumblr doesn't allow comments. Limits are your friend. "Papers for Hackers" has differentiation & a lot more likely to succeed. I think it'd be awesome to cultivate this actively. Perhaps it comes with code examples linked to github etc.

by dkural 12y ago

alixander 12y ago

That's very useful advice, thank you. I wonder how I might further facilitate the discussion part of it. List of "unanswered questions" (taking advantage of the fact people like to help others in an intellectual setting, generally speaking) and having a "paper of the day" come to mind, among some other things. On that idea of narrowing user segment, I was initially of thinking for it to be just targeted for the "hacker" community (computer science, math, psychology articles seem pretty popular here), but I figure if that does happen it'll just happen naturally without restrictions/limitations.

dkural 12y ago
Both of your ideas really good - a 'paper of the day' or some other way of narrowing content so achieve fusion. hacker community is also a great focus, since there is a lot of first-adopters, willingness to use new things etc. Even more unsolicited advice: I would NOT assume it will happen naturally - in fact restriction is your best friend. Stackoverflow did not allow people to simply create new communities, it restricted this quite a bit. Even GitHub initially cultivated its roots in the Ruby community, which then spread to adjacent communities. Likewise many communities delineate borders and delete user content. Stackoverflow likes concrete questions, for instance. Tumblr doesn't allow comments. Limits are your friend. "Papers for Hackers" has differentiation & a lot more likely to succeed. I think it'd be awesome to cultivate this actively. Perhaps it comes with code examples linked to github etc.