I built a Q&A layer for research papers on top of arXiv.org

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I built a Q&A layer for research papers on top of arXiv.org

Hi there, my name's Rafael and I am launching gotit.pub today! At the same time I'm "scratching my own itch". Let me explain: Gotit.pub is an online platform where anyone can discuss research papers, as a layer directly on top of the paper itself. I built it because it needs to exist and because I couldn't find any other place on the web that's doing this. As part of my regular job I read plenty of research papers (Vision, Graphics, NeRFs, ML etc..) and often I find things that are still unclear to me after studying. I'm sure the authors or community could answer my questions easily but where to start? Open a ticket on Github? Write an email to the authors? Ask on SO? None of these are great because the context of the paper is lost and it's (ab)using the platforms for tasks they were not designed to do. Arxiv.org has done a fantastic job democratizing the distribution of research (and it's winning! [1]). However it's only one-directional. The discussion and feedback channels are scattered, informal and/or inaccessible to many. I built gotit.pub to fix that. Also, looking at HN, for many users the value lies in the attached discussion more than in the linked site itself. I believe that this model also applies to research articles and that in the future it will feel unnatural to read an interesting paper without having the community's comments as an attached layer. I should mention that I have no PhD or ever worked in a research lab. Maybe (likely?) there's already an obvious solution to the discussion/feedback problem that I am not seeing. In that case I'm still happy to have built it because I know it'll be useful for me, personally :) I hope though that many of you will find it useful too (let me have your feedback in the comments!). Cheers! PS: You can actually discuss any research paper, not just ones on arXiv.org! PPS: For those interested, the whole site is built with Svelte / SvelteKit and a lot of PDF.js hackery. More bells and whistles to come, it's just MVP stage at this point. The quirky name is from another unrelated side-project of mine (gotit.dev) which builds on top of git but so far hasn't seen the light of day. I couldn't think of a good name for this one so I just adopted the name. Still fits, I think! [1] https://arxiv.org/stats/monthly_submissions