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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Doomscrolling Research Papers

Hi HN, Would love your thoughts on Open Paper Digest. It’s a mobile feed that let’s you “doomscroll” through summaries of popular papers that were published recently. Backstory There’s a combination of factors lead me to build this: 1. Quality of content social media apps has decreased, but I still notice that it is harder than ever for me to stay away from these apps. 2. I’ve been saying for a while now that I should start reading papers to keep up with what’s going on in AI-world. Initially, I set out to build something solely for point 2. This version was more search-focussed, and…

Open Paper Digest is a mobile app that presents summaries of recently published research papers in a social media feed format, designed to make doomscrolling productive. It targets people interested in staying current… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    Hi HN! Open Paper allows you to annotate and understand your research papers with an AI copilot. I wanted a paper-reading assistant that let met actually dig into papers in-place while benefiting from AI tooling. When it comes to studying, I'm not a fan of the typical chat interfaces that obfuscate uploaded files and turn them into black box 'content'. Hence, I've implemented a split-pane view. To mitigate the risk of hallucinations, all AI responses come with grounded citations that refer back to the source material in-flow. Some feature highlights: - Actually read your papers in one place…

    2025 · openpaper.ai · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Understanding scientific articles can be tough, even in your own field. Trying to comprehend articles from others? Good luck. Enter, Now I Get It! I made this app for curious people. Simply upload an article and after a few minutes you'll have an interactive web page showcasing the highlights. Generated pages are stored in the cloud and can be viewed from a gallery. Now I Get It! uses the best LLMs out there, which means the app will improve as AI improves. Free for now - it's capped at 20 articles per day so I don't burn cash. A few things I (and maybe you will) find interesting: * This is…

    Feb 2026 · nowigetit.us · its alternatives →

  3. 3HA

    Hey there HN! I wanted to share a pet project of mine. I built HackYourNews [1] to scratch a personal itch: Knowing which stories to focus on while browsing aimlessly (though there is a certain joy in that, as well!) HackYourNews uses OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo to summarize the destination article as well as the comments section. Summarization of the article is always cached, while summaries of the comments are regenerated if the comments count is >10% (or >10 comments) different. While I styled the homepage to welcome HNers, my preferred view is the Mobile view, accessed from the navbar. This…

    2023 · hackyournews.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4HB

    Hey guys, I love HN! I wanted to extend the same aesthetic and community towards things beyond tech-related news. I thought it would be cool to get the same quality of community gathered around the latest and greatest research coming out. Let me know what you guys think of what I have so far. It's still early so there are probably bugs and other quality issues. If there's any features missing that you'd want let me know. ALSO, if any of you are familiar with the map of the territory of any particular field, please let me know! Would love to pick your brain and to come up with a 'most…

    2024 · papertalk.xyz · its alternatives →

  5. 5WA

    Wikipedia you can doomscroll

    Feb 2026 · xikipedia.org · its alternatives →

  6. 6AE

    Right now it's a Nicotine patch for brain rot/doom scrolling. You still get the scroll, but with more meaningful content. WHERE I WANT IT TO GO: Users mark what they are interested in (e.g. AI, or Space or Whatever), and it should crawl the latest scientific articles, high quality YouTube videos, pods, present it in a format that fits you, in a nice feed. NOW: You can search for anything (e.g. "Sea Explorers" --> The app crawls Wikipedia or YouTube and pulls together a short feed (e.g. Columbus, Vasco da Gama etc.,). I'm using RAG so that I always can reference the original data source…

    2025 · reelly.app · its alternatives →

  7. 7
    Digest.AI▲145

    AI-automated digest for your team's Slack

    2016 · its alternatives →

  8. 8P
    Paperkast▲121

    http://paperkast.com Hello everybody, I just wanted to share a link aggregator website: paperkast.com. It's a article sharing and discussion hub. It's opened recently. I think it was a need for the academia. I don't think there is an online community for paper discussion. Twitter is good for publication sharing but there is no central discussion around a paper. It's all over the place. Seperately, we know that the link aggregation style has a good reputation. It's a good stimulation for discussion. What do you think of it?

    2018 · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    An honest to god, non-algorithmic reverse chrono list of tech news that passes my signal-to-noise tests, updated hourly. A lightweight a page design as I've been able to keep; simple, clean, fast. No commercial features or aspirations - this is a passion project, something I've been fooling around with on and off for decades. There's a "Top" view too with an LLM edited front page & summary, and categorized views for a large number of topics - see the Directory. A few more buried features to explore, but the fundamental use case is pop in, scan, exit - fast and concise. Your feedback would be…

    Oct 2025 · deadstack.net · its alternatives →

  10. 10BA
  11. 11

    OpenScholarXIV is an open-source, aesthetic, minimal and AI powered app that allows users to search, read, bookmark, share, download and view summaries of academic papers from the arXiv repository. - ScholarXIV/OpenScholarXIV

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12TA

    I got fed up with the news reader apps out there so I decided to make my own. Its a simple concept where it tracks all your favorite news sources for new posts and the social shares it received. Then it ranks it HN/Reddit style using social shares as upvotes. It's not meant to be alternative to HN, just a focused way to track your favorite sources. Please try it out and let me know what do you think, http://telescope.surf/ Note: you can do 'Add to Homescreen' on mobile to make it as an app. Please leave a feedback or any feature wishlist you may have. Thanks!

    2017 · its alternatives →

  13. 13LY

    Almost one year ago I asked HN if anybody is interested to make a Web app to make reading and finding scientific papers smarter [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1664648]. No one did, at least no one did what "I" think is the best way to approach this problem. A a few month ago I decided to do it myself.<p>Meet JournalClub iPad app (absolutely free), http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/journalclub/id443819334? I have a recommendation engine in the pipeline that I would introduce in the next update (hopefully in a month or so). I really appreciate any comments, feedbacks.

    2011 · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Summarize articles in a tap ⚡

    2020 · play.google.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15AF

    Hey HN! I've always found it hard to keep up with the latest AI research, so I built Arxiv Feed! https://arxiv-feed.vercel.app/ It's basically a feed of AI research papers + a one-liner explaining what problem its solving, etc. You can also click on any paper to get a TL;DR. Right now, I've only indexed a few hundred large language model papers, but will expand to indexing AI papers in other topics. Thinking of also adding a way for people to up-vote/down-vote papers. Would love to hear any thoughts/feedback! :D Thanks!

    2023 · arxiv-feed.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Employs AI to revolutionize your research experience.

    2023 · openread.academy · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    I got tired of reading clickbait articles and seeing irrelevant ads. So I pulled in a few RSS feeds to create a news digest using OpenAI 4o-mini for summarisation. Appreciate any feedback you'all might have. PS: News-summarisation may have been done to death, but I'm a UI noob, so I'm using this project to learn some.

    2025 · newsful.ai · its alternatives →

  18. 18PF
  19. 19

    Hey folks! This is a project that I've been working in my free time for the past few months. It's a news aggregator that uses AI to select relevant articles and summarize them. The default sources are frameworks and libraries' updates, popular HN topics, and languages' subreddits threads that make past a certain threshold. You can run a local instance (needs an OpenAI key) and customize it with your own sources, and adjust the prompt as well. The resulting website can be browsed at https://dev-radar.com/ My next experiment will be with local news. I'm building some feeds with…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20PD
  21. 21MF

    Just finished my second year at college studying Computer Science, and wanted to try and gain experience as a full stack dev this summer, so I made a website that allows users to create stories using openai's API, using embeddings for custom terms users can define, and create short stories and chapters alike. I'm mainly just looking for some feedback on how I can improve it or make it more presentable, so any help/feedback is welcome and appreciated!

    2023 · plotnotes.ai · its alternatives →

  22. 22HC

    A year and a half after I published https://HackYourNews.com, I've rewritten it to be neater and added support for more news sources. HackYourNews.com v1 had a great response on HN [1] and consistently sees ~2k weekly unique visitors. There were many long-standing requests that I wanted to fulfill (thanks for your patience!): a proper dark mode, correct rendering on mobile devices, and more cogent summaries. This rewrite is the result. gpt-4o-mini reduces the cost of summarization to an absurd degree, so it's now sustainable to keep this free service going! Someday, I hope to use…

    2025 · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Hello everyone! I always found it hard to find new research papers outside of my usual bubble. I thought a random feed (with no recommendation algorithms) might be a fun way to explore. But I also didn’t want to waste time on completely unrelated stuff — so the idea of a fast, swipeable format came to mind. Wikitok was a real inspiration! But Arxiv and Open Review APIs weren’t as robust as Wikipedia, so I pulled the papers into a Postgres backend. Right now, I’ve indexed papers from a few recent ML conferences to see if this might be useful for others too. No signups required and it’s…

    2025 · artok.app · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Hello HN! Particle News product engineer here. Keeping up with the news is overwhelming in an age of information overload. Particle reimagines the experience by organizing articles into comprehensive "Stories," offering clear, concise summaries to quickly grasp what matters. Today, we reached the #1 spot in "Newspapers & Magazine" on the iOS App Store—and I thought I'd share a bit of our backstory. I've been connected to this team for a long time. About 20 years ago, I shared a house with our CTO and co-founder Marcel Molina. I helped him get started with programming. Since then, Marcel has…

    2025 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →