Hacker News Reader

Huh. You know, I think HackerNews folks must approach literature searches and reading academic papers differently from the scholarly world at large. I can't think of any of my colleagues who would be looking for an algorithmically driven feed of papers to peruse. Usually we have specific questions we are trying to answer in research.

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A lot of my colleagues either:

- read arXiv (the algorithm there is pretty simple, but it's a feed of sorts), or

- follow twitter accounts to learn about new results

So, like it or not, a lot of people are getting their feed from algorithms.

I think you missed my point that the idea of a "feed" being something scholars need is not really clear. It is more that a feed is something that website developers know how to make

Yeah sorry I was being overly oblique above: I know a lot of academics who learn about a lot of results via twitter. Personally I don't do it, but a lot of people in academia do.

I'd consider twitter a feed, and one driven by a proprietary algorithm at that. I'm not sure if it's better or worse to have the interest of these academics guided by a company like twitter, but maybe having some other options is good.

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