The culture of rejection in computer science publications

I'm well-known in a research community. I'm positioned such that I don't need more academic points. I've mostly stopped publishing in branded prestige academic venues, in part due to rejection rates.

My goal in doing work and writing papers is to see them disseminated. The acceptance/rejection process is asinine -- studies show it's basically random. I've had one paper in my whole career where the reviewers did a proper review (e.g. worked through the math). The rest were quick skims. Comments often show the reviewers never read the paper. The stuff that makes it through this process is often nonsense, while very high-quality work is often cut.

The very best paper I wrote in my career has never seen the light of day. It was shortened to a 4-page work-in-progress because a reviewer didn't read it (the feedback was literally nonsense: that the sample size was small enough to be anecdotal; I had the largest sample size in the history of the research field).

The only impact of this egoistical search for prestige-by-low-accept-rates is that people who have better things to do with their time leave, and that research dissemination is slowed.

Those excuses make little sense in the real world:

1) If your conference has a 10% accept rate, it's easy enough to book a bigger venue next year. I've been to conferences with dozens of people, and ones with tens of thousands. It all works well. Bigger ones work better, if anything.

2) PCs aren't thoughtful enough to do that well, and even so, the goal of a conference shouldn't be to select things which resonate with the entrenched PC. That's why many ideas need to wait for a generation of old, conservative professors to die to make it out there.

3) The whole obsession with prestige is stupid and misguided.

Journals and conferences ought to have quality bars. Are there typos and grammar errors? Were there clear IRB ethic violations? Did you use error bars on your plots? Was data fabricated? Is the research methodologically sound? Is it coherent and readable? And so on. If it passes those bars, it should be published. If no one reads it / attends a talk, that's okay too -- importance can and should be determined after-the-fact.

True, but I feel like the strength of the moderation at HN is that it is mostly formal and less editorial. People are moderated mostly for how they say things, not what they're saying, especially by explicitly choosing as the primary criteria for the site what hackers find interesting.

Not that you couldn't have a narrower focus, but it should be an explicit focus where the question of whether something merits moderation is a yes or no question that could be answered by anyone, rather than a know it when I see it stance that just reflects the current personal standards of an individual or clique.

Does this belong on Hacker News? Was it upvoted and not flagged too often by people with sufficient karma on Hacker News? Then dang doesn't have to make a decision. This is not a perfect characterization, because moderation here does rarely drop into attempts to exclude types of discussions that the patrons find annoying (which is rationalized because the subjects are controversial and draw in people who want to fight, and repetitive because these people fight all the time so have habits and standard arguments.)

I'm really just expanding on the word "empowered" here, because most mods have absolute power unless they have to answer to other mods. The difference here is not power, it's philosophy.

> 3. While the size of any one conference has to be fixed, tech has made it infinitely easier to create new conferences and journals with other focus areas. They may not start with the prestige of a larger journal, but if the papers published start to have an impact, it can catalyze an entire subfield of work.

Does it though? The largest conferences I go to as a CS academic have hundreds of people. There are academic areas where 10x people participate. The size limitation is a self-imposed excuse to keep acceptance low. I have been PC chair of two conferences and my attempts to expand the conference numbers were shot down by the steering committee precisely for this reason, not because we couldn't find a larger room.

A clear exposition of an obscure and hard to understand result is lack of 'respect for readers' time'? How so?

Nothing has made me happier than to simply leave the academic/publishing side of CS and focus entirely on things that I find interesting and can do on a single desktop computer. If I share, I share and give people my code and ideas freely, but don't publish. Why would I want to take all my hard work and beg somebody with power to put it on a piece of paper?

If I have something useful to say I'll put it in arxiv. Peer reviewers just wasted my time.