Academia.edu

Raised as a usability problem by 8 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2010–2025), in 7 threads.

People raised many different problems with Academia.edu, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 8 complaints

Site uses dark patterns that push users into actions they did not choose2018-09-18
Links from search results demand login before showing the paper2017-04-30
No way to manually add papers or enter a DOI to fetch metadata2013-12-10
Front page gives almost no information and no obvious way to explore the site2013-09-27
Must log in to view or download anything, even basic content2013-09-26
Front page is ambiguous about what the site is for2011-12-01
Can't find a way to get formal references for papers2011-12-01
Can't click section names during sign-up, and research interest categories are sloppy and duplicated2010-04-29