I kinda of worry that if this site succeeded, it would slowly do to papers what news aggregators and the internet already did to news. Grind and incentivize them down into clickbait with no meat, with as few things as possible that people won't immediately understand.<p>For example, looking over my own papers for examples, a one page note [1] got more scites than a paper I contributed to that introduced several techniques cumulatively dropping the projected cost of simulating a chemistry thing by more than a factor of a million [2]. That's a cherry picked example, the pattern isn't that consistent, but having seen what happened to news sites it still worries me.<p>...not that the incentives for how to structure and publish papers are that great to begin with.<p>[1]: <a href="https://scirate.com/arxiv/2106.11513" rel="nofollow">https://scirate.com/arxiv/2106.11513</a>
[2]: <a href="https://scirate.com/arxiv/1805.03662" rel="nofollow">https://scirate.com/arxiv/1805.03662</a>
I remember scirate is pretty old - the domain was registered in 2007. Given the low number of comments now, and with those are concentrated into a narrow part of arXiv, it's unlikely to take off generally.
Funny to see this here. I created scirate years ago when I was in academia working in quantum computing. Back when Digg was hot. When I left that world and joined Google, I shut it down as I needed to spend all my time learning to code (true today as well I suppose). It was then rewritten by others. Twice! And relaunched using the old domain name. Many thanks to the current stewards.<p>Amusingly it was even more useful to me after I left academia. Scirate’s community is almost entirely theoretical quantum computing, and so I was able to keep up with the field by looking every three months or so at the top papers.<p>As noted in other comments, the end point of vanity voting isn't great. It's not great at discovery, but I have found papers there I would never have read. But because it is a small community it actually does a good job in quantifying what the community feels is important. I suspect if scirate was ever more widely used it would be less useful.<p>Another interesting phenomenon is that no one ever precisely defined what voting meant. Some people think of it as endorsing. Others as bookmarking. Not sure what impact this has, but sometimes if you score your own paper people will growl at you.
If this is to appeal to a community, there has to be some kind of incentive for that community to add their comments (content) to this site. What is it? Reputation?<p>In general, it could be appealing to have an open, established process for gathering public feedback on articles. It seems a scientific community would rather have their own version set up, where they could also curate content (rather than browse by category).
It is very to similar Short Science [0].
Since both didn't take off, maybe they should merge.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.shortscience.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.shortscience.org</a>