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/

> My own reason is .. maybe not possible to hit on research papers.

I think fancy people with appropriate credentials and .edu emails are all using openreview? So the audience is what, the unwashed masses who also happen to be doing some light reading at the bleeding edge of knowledge? Surely there are dozens of us I tell you, dozens! =P But yeah, maybe not enough to sustain a social network.

Never heard of alphaxiv, will try. I would also love for this to work, probably not willing to risk slogging through science twitter/bluesky/mastodon. Honestly HN would be the obvious place if it would add a pretty simple tagging system as most of the people interested are probably already here. I don't think we'll see that, because if we had filters no one would go to the front page, and that'd be a bad thing for certain interests.

Personally, I think social media and academic publishing timescales, rewards and social conventions don't match very well. Social networking feels transient and impersonal. I would like to take some time to form my opinion about a paper, not jump in with a post. Maybe some comment box would be ok to write a couple of nice things about a paper, but it doesn't feel the place to write harsh criticism or have complex discussion where things could be misunderstood. Rather than write in the public record, if I think the paper has a deep flaw I would prefer to contact the authors first. This can be followed up by discussions in your own papers. Others may have different opinions, of course.

Scirate.com has been going since before 2010 and still active as far as I'm aware. Mostly used by quantum info folks though.

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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