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.
> 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.
It sounds like you're advocating for arXiv to become viXra. On <a href="https://vixra.org/all/2610" rel="nofollow">https://vixra.org/all/2610 the second paper is currently "Correct Interpretation of the Great Discoveries in Particle Physics: I. Reconsidering the Higgs Boson via Vedic Vortex Structure", followed by a paper arguing that classical electrodynamics is bogus, "Gauss’s Flux Theorem Does not Hold in Time-Varying Electric Fields", and then "On the Boundary Problem in the Origins of Matter, Life, and Consciousness".
I don't think arXiv will continue to receive "quite some funding" if this is what it contains.
Vixra suffers from the "Witch Hunt problem" because Arxiv exists.
If Arxiv was the only game in town and it allowed everything, the result would be more like GitHub or Substack. That is, you wouldn't be able to trust everything hosted there, and a lot of it would be low-quality promotional garbage, with filtering moved to a different layer.
You could do some kind of karma system for example, where the prestige of your institution, your own karma, number of citations, papers published in high impact-factor journals etc would affect karma weight. You could have journals be like "awesome-x" lists on Github, with authors who have already been published there able to endorse other papers. I believe the mathematics community is trying that.
If you can't understand Vedic Vortex Structure without such karma system, your understanding will be bad anyway. Even legitimate publications are easy to misinterpret and sensationalize, social dynamics affects it too.
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.
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
It sounds like you're advocating for arXiv to become viXra. On <a href="https://vixra.org/all/2610" rel="nofollow">https://vixra.org/all/2610 the second paper is currently "Correct Interpretation of the Great Discoveries in Particle Physics: I. Reconsidering the Higgs Boson via Vedic Vortex Structure", followed by a paper arguing that classical electrodynamics is bogus, "Gauss’s Flux Theorem Does not Hold in Time-Varying Electric Fields", and then "On the Boundary Problem in the Origins of Matter, Life, and Consciousness".
I don't think arXiv will continue to receive "quite some funding" if this is what it contains.
miki123211 · · focus · HN ↗
If Arxiv was the only game in town and it allowed everything, the result would be more like GitHub or Substack. That is, you wouldn't be able to trust everything hosted there, and a lot of it would be low-quality promotional garbage, with filtering moved to a different layer.
You could do some kind of karma system for example, where the prestige of your institution, your own karma, number of citations, papers published in high impact-factor journals etc would affect karma weight. You could have journals be like "awesome-x" lists on Github, with authors who have already been published there able to endorse other papers. I believe the mathematics community is trying that.
GoblinSlayer · · focus · HN ↗