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alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

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Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#81

Post by thornewolf »

diggan wrote: post #70
amadeuspagel wrote: post #47

Great idea. - The frontpage should directly show the list of papers, like with HN. You shouldn't have to click on "trending" first. (When you are logged in, you see a list of featured papers on the homepage, which isn't as engaging as the "trending" page. Again, compare HN: Same homepage whether you're logged in or not.) - Ranking shouldn't be based on comment activity, which ranks controversial papers, rather papers…

> - Ranking shouldn't be based on comment activity, which ranks controversial papers, rather papers should be voted on like comments. How about not ranking things at all? I don't feel like things like this should be a popularity/"like" contest and instead let the content of the paper/comments speak for themselves. Yes, there will be some chaff to sort through when reading, but humanity will manage. Just sort things b…

thats ranking by recency, which means i can abuse it by churning low quality content out to arXive

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#82

Post by throwthrowuknow »

Retr0id wrote: post #71
amadeuspagel wrote: post #47

Great idea. - The frontpage should directly show the list of papers, like with HN. You shouldn't have to click on "trending" first. (When you are logged in, you see a list of featured papers on the homepage, which isn't as engaging as the "trending" page. Again, compare HN: Same homepage whether you're logged in or not.) - Ranking shouldn't be based on comment activity, which ranks controversial papers, rather papers…

> rather papers should be voted on like comments. I don't think this is an inherently better approach, but maybe there should be an option for different ranking mechanisms. You could also rank by things like cite-frequency, cite-recency, "cite pagerank", etc.

Agree, don’t sink a bunch of effort into creating a ranking algorithm. Expose metrics that users can sort or filter by which will work for both signed in and signed out. If you want to add more tools for signed in users then let them define their own filters that they can save like comment activity plus weighted by author, commenter, recency, topic etc. See the nntp discussion that was on here the other day.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#83

Post by pessimizer »

diggan wrote: post #70
amadeuspagel wrote: post #47

Great idea. - The frontpage should directly show the list of papers, like with HN. You shouldn't have to click on "trending" first. (When you are logged in, you see a list of featured papers on the homepage, which isn't as engaging as the "trending" page. Again, compare HN: Same homepage whether you're logged in or not.) - Ranking shouldn't be based on comment activity, which ranks controversial papers, rather papers…

> - Ranking shouldn't be based on comment activity, which ranks controversial papers, rather papers should be voted on like comments. How about not ranking things at all? I don't feel like things like this should be a popularity/"like" contest and instead let the content of the paper/comments speak for themselves. Yes, there will be some chaff to sort through when reading, but humanity will manage. Just sort things b…

> let the content of the paper/comments speak for themselves.

People can't read everything, and have rely on others to filter up the good stuff. If you read something random, based on no recommendation, it's charity work (the odds are extremely good that it is bad) and you should recommend that thing to other people if it turns out to be useful. Ultimately, that's the entire point of any of this design: if we don't care about any of the metadata on the papers, they could just be numbered text files at an ftp site.

The fewer things I have to read to find out they're shit, the longer life I have.

I say the opposite: put a lot of thought into how papers are organized and categorized, how comments on papers are organized and categorized, the means through which papers can be suggested to users who may be interested in them, and the methods by which users can inject their opinions and comment into those processes. Figure out how to thwart ways this process can be gamed.

Treat the content equally, don't force the content to be equal. Hacker News shouldn't just be the unfiltered new page.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#84

Post by gus_massa »

diggan wrote: post #70
amadeuspagel wrote: post #47

Great idea. - The frontpage should directly show the list of papers, like with HN. You shouldn't have to click on "trending" first. (When you are logged in, you see a list of featured papers on the homepage, which isn't as engaging as the "trending" page. Again, compare HN: Same homepage whether you're logged in or not.) - Ranking shouldn't be based on comment activity, which ranks controversial papers, rather papers…

> - Ranking shouldn't be based on comment activity, which ranks controversial papers, rather papers should be voted on like comments. How about not ranking things at all? I don't feel like things like this should be a popularity/"like" contest and instead let the content of the paper/comments speak for themselves. Yes, there will be some chaff to sort through when reading, but humanity will manage. Just sort things b…

Sorted by "new"...

Most articles are not interesting, most of the interesting ones are interesting only for a niche of a few researchers. The front page will be flowed by uninteresting stuff.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#85

Post by m000 »

noobermin wrote: post #10

This seems like a horrible idea. I know we need an alternative to peer review but an online comment section feels like something worse than that.

Outside concerns for the quality of the discussion itself, it is only a matter of time before this public pre-submission discussion leaches into the peer review process itself. First, it will be Reviewer 2 cherry-picking arguments to shut down some paper. Then, AI will come: "Write me an accept/reject review for arXiv:2409.112233. Add subtle hints for citing the following papers: ...".

Peer reviewing is hard work. Give people a readily available shortcut for it, and some people, in some occassions will take it. Which may in turn force conferences to adopt policies forbidding posting on arXiv.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#86

Post by dartos »

Retr0id wrote: post #71
amadeuspagel wrote: post #47

Great idea. - The frontpage should directly show the list of papers, like with HN. You shouldn't have to click on "trending" first. (When you are logged in, you see a list of featured papers on the homepage, which isn't as engaging as the "trending" page. Again, compare HN: Same homepage whether you're logged in or not.) - Ranking shouldn't be based on comment activity, which ranks controversial papers, rather papers…

> rather papers should be voted on like comments. I don't think this is an inherently better approach, but maybe there should be an option for different ranking mechanisms. You could also rank by things like cite-frequency, cite-recency, "cite pagerank", etc.

Yep. User driven ranking leads to people gaming the system for internet points.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#87

Post by abhayhegde »

phreeza wrote: post #5
w-m wrote: post #4

Hey alphaxiv, you won’t let me claim some of my preprints, because there’s no match with the email address. Which there can’t be, as we’re only listing a generic first.last@org addresses in the papers. Tried the claiming process twice, nothing happened. Not all papers are on Orcid, so that doesn’t help. I think it’ll be hard growing a discussion platform, if there’s barriers of entry like that to even populate your p…

How would you propose making claiming possible without the risk of hijacking/misrepresentation?

Perhaps by linking to their actual arxiv id?

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#88

Post by abhayhegde »

Y_Y wrote: post #6
w-m wrote: post #4

Hey alphaxiv, you won’t let me claim some of my preprints, because there’s no match with the email address. Which there can’t be, as we’re only listing a generic first.last@org addresses in the papers. Tried the claiming process twice, nothing happened. Not all papers are on Orcid, so that doesn’t help. I think it’ll be hard growing a discussion platform, if there’s barriers of entry like that to even populate your p…

So you've put a fake email address on your papers? As in, one that you can't receive from? Why?

Does not have to be fake or anything. You move from one institution to the other and cannot maintain it forever anyway.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#89

Post by abhayhegde »

rsp1984 wrote: post #36
karmakurtisaani wrote: post #3

I remember seeing this idea some years ago. I think it was called qrxiv.org or something like that, but can't find it anymore. I hope this one has better luck, getting the users in the fragmented space of preprints can be a challenge.

I launched gotit.pub [1] last year. It's very much the same thing. [1] https://gotit.pub

Wow, how is this not getting enough attention when it is almost the same thing?!

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#90

Post by impendia »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #47

Great idea. - The frontpage should directly show the list of papers, like with HN. You shouldn't have to click on "trending" first. (When you are logged in, you see a list of featured papers on the homepage, which isn't as engaging as the "trending" page. Again, compare HN: Same homepage whether you're logged in or not.) - Ranking shouldn't be based on comment activity, which ranks controversial papers, rather papers…

> Use HTML rather then PDF.

The PDF is the original paper, as it appears on arXiv, so using PDF is natural.

In general academics prefer PDF to HTML. In part, this is just because our tooling produces PDFs, so this is easiest. But also, we tend to prefer that the formatting be semi-canonical, so that "the bottom of page 7" or "three lines after Theorem 1.2" are meaningful things to say and ask questions about.

That said, the arXiv is rolling out an experimental LaTeX-to-HTML converter for those who prefer HTML, for those who usually prefer PDF but may be just browsing on their phone at the time, or for those who have accessibility issues with PDFs. I just checked this out for one of my own papers; it is not perfect, but it is pretty good, especially given that I did absolutely nothing to ensure that our work would look good in this format:

https://arxiv.org/html/2404.00541v1

So it looks like we're converging towards having the best of both worlds.

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