I am a non-academic who reads a lot of academic papers. I love arXiv, and I probably spend too much time on there.
Here's my 10-minute take on scirate (from viewing it on a mobile browser). Overall, I don't immediately see any added value. The layout and design isn't great - not on mobile at least. The main view isn't optimized for what I want to see. There's a huge navigation tree that takes up all the view space. Then, it shows me a list of ranked papers that are not of interest to me. It forces me to register to access any features. I don't see comments on any of the papers, only a Reddit-style rating. Do I have to register to see the comments? Overall, I don't think I'd ever go back. But, maybe it wasn't designed with my type of use cases in mind.
Thanks for the thoughts. (Hope it's clear I have no connection to SciRate.) The link to comments is directly under the Reddit-style rating, although it only appears if there actually are comments. Most papers don't have comments and you have to be logged into comment.
Personally, I don't expect it to be nice on mobile and I don't want it to be effortless to comment. The amount of work it takes to make a useful academic comment dwarfs those tiny frictions.
Here's my 10-minute take on scirate (from viewing it on a mobile browser). Overall, I don't immediately see any added value. The layout and design isn't great - not on mobile at least. The main view isn't optimized for what I want to see. There's a huge navigation tree that takes up all the view space. Then, it shows me a list of ranked papers that are not of interest to me. It forces me to register to access any features. I don't see comments on any of the papers, only a Reddit-style rating. Do I have to register to see the comments? Overall, I don't think I'd ever go back. But, maybe it wasn't designed with my type of use cases in mind.