I 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 fast speed for people to continue to engage, which is maybe not possible to hit on research papers.

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.

[1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/

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

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