Many platforms have attempted to build communities centered around research discussions, with notable examples including ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and the recent addition of Alphaxiv. However, these platforms often struggle to create an engaging user experience that encourages regular participation; they've not yet solved the classic chicken-and-egg problem of building a critical mass of active users.

In response to this gap, researchers have increasingly turned to Twitter to soft-launch their papers in order to generate buzz, get discussions started, and build credibility. Unfortunately, Twitter's environment is compromised by bots, explicit images, and many other problematic elements. It would be nice if the research community had a dedicated platform that offers,

I developed a prototype, kleesia.com and open sourced it. While it is by no means a flushed out product and contains many bugs (for one, it is NOT mobile friendly), it gives a starting point for how a research-focused discussion platform should be organized.

This is a hard problem (!), especially the content moderation aspect of it, but I hope in the coming years more capable engineers can continue hacking away at it and coming up with worthwhile solutions.

I'll end this post with saying, there is a question of whether platforms like this are truly needed. Many have tried and failed and maybe that's for a reason. Dr.Phil Metzger made a great twitter post on why he believes Alphaxiv will likely not work and I don't think he's alone in his thinking. Any succesful platform would need to adequately address his gripes (which are mostly around trolls wreaking havoc, users asking extremely basic questions, and the expectations on researchers to reply).

In any case, if you have any questions, comments, or just want to chat about this, email me at dtchuindjo at gmail dot com!