16 comments
The article has a melancholic tone running through it, felt especially keenly when you consider it a microcosm of the much wider struggles of maintaining a public good: sustaining it while keeping its integrity.
When your service is small or not easily visible - while still doing significant good - it's hard to find enough people willing to spend their time and resources helping you sustain it.
When your service becomes big enough to be noticeable - which is the arXiv is in by now - it also becomes attractive to the people looking to subvert it to be something else, to enshittify it, and so the limiting factor in getting help becomes the risk to its integrity.
The power issue with platforms is a bit like with polities : sure, a platform might be great when ruled by an enlightened despot (and there's probably a survival bias here for the most enlightened ones ?), but that's only a small fraction of its life of domination, and what happens once the enlightened despot goes away (in one way or the other) ?
So it's probably better to not rely on platforms in the first place...
ArXiv: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv
ArXiv accepts .ps (PostScript), .tex (LaTeX source), and .pdf (PDF) ScholarlyArticle uploads.
ArXiv docs > Formats for text of submission: https://info.arxiv.org/help/submit/index.html#formats-for-te...
The internet and the web are the most transformative platforms in all of science, though.
> I learned Fortran in the 1960s, and real programmers didn’t document
I have a reason to believe that this is not the first time I heard this argument coming from a boomer physicist.
ArXiv has been on a PR blitz lately. Enshittification incoming. At least they lasted longer than GitHub.
We're in a political climate where scientific institutions are under threat, so of course they will loudly justify their own existence and value. It'd be irresponsible of them not to. That's not all that similar to a company being acquired and subsequently squeezed for value. ArXiv isn't a loss leader for a venture backed firm.
arXiv has nothing to gain by a PR blitz. Any academic knows what is arXiv exactly for, and there is no intention to grow user base or whatever. It's not a social media.
Not sure I agree with the comment you're responding to. But the article discusses some of their funding troubles, and the main mage of arxiv.org itself has a donate link. So I think perhaps the media presence might be motivated by a desire to fundraise (and IMO they absolutely deserve funding because of the important work they do).
You're right. I didn't consider the funding angle at all, but only the accusation of "enshittification" which usually comes from a VC or an entity that wants to generate more profits by expanding. On the other hand, I do think Simons Foundations would not let arXiv die. Also, I don't agree that arXiv's media presence has ulterior motives after all. It might just be that it's getting its share of fame.
You may reasonably disagree with my comment, but using your imagination you'll find that there are lots of ways by which arXiv (the organization) and its staff could benefit from PR.
Lots of academics in distant fields are unaware of arXiv, and even academics (like me) who use arXiv daily and host their preprints there don't think of it as any more than a place to store, catalogue, and retrieve papers.
Look at all the ways in which arXiv is (like any institution) perpetuating and expanding itself: https://blog.arxiv.org/
Look at these extra things arXiv is doing (including commercial integrations): https://info.arxiv.org/labs/showcase.html
I've been gratefully using and contributing to arXiv since 2008, and I hope it continues to be the incredible resource that it is. I think your take is naive and that even great institutions can end up like Mozilla.
arXiv has one of my papers on hold for a long time because their team couldn't believe I—someone without a CS degree—was able to create a programming language from scratch on my own.
1. Creating a programming language from scratch isn't hard.
2. It's also worthless.
3. arXiv is for scientific papers and not just random PDFs or project reports.
4. Creating a programming language can be science but something tells me that yours isn't.
I've seen solutions to the halting problem published on something called ResearchGate. I don't know anything about it but maybe you can upload there. Or just use your website or Google Drive, like how a normal person shares PDFs.
You don't have all the context. The language serves a serious novel purpose. You seem to be bitter about someone uploading a research paper (I didn't say it was a white paper) to arXiv.
You also didn’t share all the context. By all means criticise arXiv, but unless you provide enough context you have to expect to receive criticism back.
Personally I’d be fascinated to hear what your language was that warranted a paper submission to arXiv if you want to share.