Arxiv papers are not supposed to signify anything. The only reason that people may derive some kind of career benefits is because Google Scholar indexes it and counts it towards the h-index etc. All that metric-based career-optimization going on is quite broken anyway, so this is fixing things from the wrong end as well. (The better end: stop hiring and promoting people based on Arxiv paper counts, so there is no incentive to flood it)
The hosting cost side I can understand, though they received quite some funding recently, but I assume it's not going towards actually running the site, but to who knows what broader impacts and so on.
Moderation for Arxiv is a silly idea. It already shouldn't be taken as a quality signal that something is able to be up on Arxiv. Obviously they should remove illegal stuff, but beyond that, requiring moderation is a misunderstanding of their role and reason for popularity.
If hosting is too expensive, I guess an alternative aggregator could also arise. With just metadata and a hash of the pdf that can be hosted anywhere, and as the sumbitter, if you move the file, you can change the URL.
The main reason for Arxiv's existence is the timestamping and the easy referencing. (Though I admit that the stable hosting is also a pretty important part, but they mention moderation effort as the reason, not the hosting costs.)
Academia is losing sight of the forest for the trees, can't see more than an arm's length ahead of their noses.
Agree that it basically shouldn’t be necessary. But unfortunately Arxiv isn’t able to change the bad incentive structure that the broader hiring ecosystem has set up, right?
If academics and their committees actually deeply considered the scientific qualities of applicants, gaming the numbers would not matter. So I just find it hard to blame AI slop instead of the broken process that academia has settled on.
Part of the reason that the value of Arxiv papers has gone up, is that it's pretty well known that the conference review system is already quite broken and random and lazy and superficial. So being rejected from there is not a good reason to ignore a paper, so conference-rejected Arxiv-only but good papers are a regular occurrence. If conference review had better signal, arxiv could have zero signal.
The other issue is the time delay. Conferences have stopped being an actual place to learn about new work, the way it had been 10+ years ago. Now it's all outdated stuff, and as a specialist you already know the important papers months before the actual conference, so the conference is a networking event basically. The real exchange of ideas moved to Arxiv and Github and social media, with its own problems, hype, algorithmic engagement optimization incentives etc.
But the pressure that shifted away from conferences to arxiv is continuing. The old guard was pearl clutching already by the erosion of conference rubber stamps as this big prestige. The newer ones are now trying to hold back the tide at the Arxiv line. But it will keep on moving faster and faster. And what is going to matter in the end is not how things used to be, but what delivers actual value. If the slop is slop, it will dwindle. If it starts to be actually good, all this will just turn into basically a dock-unions-opposing-automation story.
bonoboTP · · focus · HN ↗
The hosting cost side I can understand, though they received quite some funding recently, but I assume it's not going towards actually running the site, but to who knows what broader impacts and so on.
Moderation for Arxiv is a silly idea. It already shouldn't be taken as a quality signal that something is able to be up on Arxiv. Obviously they should remove illegal stuff, but beyond that, requiring moderation is a misunderstanding of their role and reason for popularity.
If hosting is too expensive, I guess an alternative aggregator could also arise. With just metadata and a hash of the pdf that can be hosted anywhere, and as the sumbitter, if you move the file, you can change the URL.
The main reason for Arxiv's existence is the timestamping and the easy referencing. (Though I admit that the stable hosting is also a pretty important part, but they mention moderation effort as the reason, not the hosting costs.)
Academia is losing sight of the forest for the trees, can't see more than an arm's length ahead of their noses.
bee_rider · · focus · HN ↗
bonoboTP · · focus · HN ↗
Part of the reason that the value of Arxiv papers has gone up, is that it's pretty well known that the conference review system is already quite broken and random and lazy and superficial. So being rejected from there is not a good reason to ignore a paper, so conference-rejected Arxiv-only but good papers are a regular occurrence. If conference review had better signal, arxiv could have zero signal.
The other issue is the time delay. Conferences have stopped being an actual place to learn about new work, the way it had been 10+ years ago. Now it's all outdated stuff, and as a specialist you already know the important papers months before the actual conference, so the conference is a networking event basically. The real exchange of ideas moved to Arxiv and Github and social media, with its own problems, hype, algorithmic engagement optimization incentives etc.
But the pressure that shifted away from conferences to arxiv is continuing. The old guard was pearl clutching already by the erosion of conference rubber stamps as this big prestige. The newer ones are now trying to hold back the tide at the Arxiv line. But it will keep on moving faster and faster. And what is going to matter in the end is not how things used to be, but what delivers actual value. If the slop is slop, it will dwindle. If it starts to be actually good, all this will just turn into basically a dock-unions-opposing-automation story.