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Comment by dricornelius | Hacker News Reader

Those interested in that, may love this: https://fermatslibrary.com

That may be great for what it is, but what I really want more than anything is to click on a link and be dropped into a buzzing Reddit for Science, full of scholarly commentary on arXiv posts.

SciRate seems to be trying to be that. It's not buzzing yet, but the UX has its heart in the right place. Unfortunately, I see from other comments that the site is pretty old and never quite managed to take off.

I wonder if my dream is ever going to happen... sigh

I always wanted something like that too. I just yearned for rapid constructive feedback from individuals with subject matter expertise, interest, and time, rather than waiting 6 months for a response from people without one or more of those things, then having to relay comms through the editor middle-person. What you mention could make a nice arXiv-Reddit joint venture... or SciRate or Fermats Library fills the void _ prayer hands_

Maybe it isn't buzzing because the community isn't ingested in making that buzzing platforms work.

What would make _you_ contribute to make SciRate more buzzing?

I'm not an academic, so don't spend many hours a week reading and thinking about papers.

And even back when I was a grad student, I wouldn't have been willing to bear all the weight of making all these discussions happen by myself. There have to be other people active on the platform to make it worth using.

There's a big chicken-and-egg problem, I suppose. But some subreddits, like r/MachineLearning, have gotten us off the ground at least.

I wasn't able to get a working copy of the Chrome extension https://fermatslibrary.com/librarian; not sure if it's unsupported, unavailable, or there's some other cause. I also do not find "librarian" available in the Chrome listing of extensions https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/extensions.

I find their "comments in sidebars" super annoying to navigate.

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