Show HN: Gratia – Share and Collaborate on Research

Hi HN,

I'm Gaurav, the creator of Gratia. Gratia began as a research project at IIIT Bangalore where we were experimenting with social networks and influence and engagement of individuals. One of our core findings was that existing social networks ignore lurkers/observers as being important. All the focus is on users who create content, upvote/like, share or comment. Users are known and measured by how much karma/upvotes/comments they receive, ignoring the lurkers who may not have done any of the actions but merely spent some time viewing the content.

This behaviour compels users to perform one of the actions for their presence to have some effect on the measuring points of other users. This is very different from real life where observers form an important part of communities.

For our research, we built a prototype pre-print management social network for researchers, similar to arxiv/researchgate incorporating our findings. The amount of time people spend on a research publication/pre-print is counted as a point to the author of that pre-print. This gives a deeper insight about how engaging your content was, compared to other metrics like upvote, views etc.

We are opening this out to the world. Please give your feedback.