You need people talking about the papers. Because they're so dense, I'd focus on just one specific niche topic, and get people versed in that subfield talking about it on there. And start with just 5 papers for people to talk about. Then once you get that going, slowly expand.
I think you're right. I want to find experts in each field who can help me create a 'most important papers' section that people like me (who don't know anything) can go to to understand the most important and 'hottest' ideas and see the discussion around them.
What iamwil says is “one niche topic”, and why he says it is:
Such social media platforms need a small niche community to get started.
I think such a platform would be most useful for AI papers. If I were in your shoes, I’d pivot to targeting AI papers only and allocate 90% of my time on community building.
Yes. focus on one specific topic or field of study. Think of it like starting a fire. You want to get the core really hot first, before trying to burn other things.
Hacker news used to be called Startup news, because all it did was talk about startups. pg only expanded it later because only startup news was too boring.
Reddit only started with a few topics, IIRC-- /r/programming r/startups, and something else. Just topics that the founders found interesting.
AI is the right way to go. It's what people are interested in right now, and market demonstrates there's a need with existing twitter handles and newsletters that purport to cover AI papers.
