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Show HN: Octosphere, a tool to decentralise scientific publishing

octosphere.social

11–20 of 38 posts

Re: Show HN: Octosphere, a tool to decentralise scientific publishing

#11

Integrate them peer review process and you’ve got a disrupter

Calling it peer review suggests gatekeeping. I suggest no gatekeepind just let any academic post a review, and maybe upvote/downvote and let crowdsourcing handle the rest.

While I appreciate no gatekeeping, the other side of the coin is gatekeeping via bots (vote manipulation).

Something like rotten tomatoes could be useful. Have a list of "verified" users (critic score) in a separate voting column as anon users (audience score).

This will often serve useful in highly controversial situations to parse common narratives.

Re: Show HN: Octosphere, a tool to decentralise scientific publishing

#12

Integrate them peer review process and you’ve got a disrupter

Peer review should be disrupted, but doing peer review via social media is not the way to go.

Has a bit of a leg up in that if it's only academics commenting, it would probably be way more usable than typical social media, maybe even outright good.

Re: Show HN: Octosphere, a tool to decentralise scientific publishing

#15
I am afraid that gatekeeping is partially essential and somewhat desired, as an academic you don't have time to read everything and some sort of quick signals, albeit very flawed, can be useful to stop wasting time reading crappy science. If you don't gatekeep you will get a lot of crappy papers or papers that mention the same thing and it will waste more time from people that wish to get a quick sense of the state of a topic/field from quality work. An open source voting system would be easily abused, so it will end up to be trusting a select service of peer reviewers or agencies. Especially if a paper includes a lot of experiments and figures that can be somewhat complicated or overwhelming. What do think?

Re: Show HN: Octosphere, a tool to decentralise scientific publishing

#17

I am afraid that gatekeeping is partially essential and somewhat desired, as an academic you don't have time to read everything and some sort of quick signals, albeit very flawed, can be useful to stop wasting time reading crappy science. If you don't gatekeep you will get a lot of crappy papers or papers that mention the same thing and it will waste more time from people that wish to get a quick sense of the state o…

This is solved by social trust graph algorithms. These allow intersubjective ranking without a central authority.

Re: Show HN: Octosphere, a tool to decentralise scientific publishing

#18

Yes publishing is broken, but academics are the last people to jump onto platforms...they never left email. If you want to change the publishing game, turn publishing into email.

In whose interests would it be for academics to "leave email"?

Theirs? (Personally, I think not.)

Re: Show HN: Octosphere, a tool to decentralise scientific publishing

#19

I am afraid that gatekeeping is partially essential and somewhat desired, as an academic you don't have time to read everything and some sort of quick signals, albeit very flawed, can be useful to stop wasting time reading crappy science. If you don't gatekeep you will get a lot of crappy papers or papers that mention the same thing and it will waste more time from people that wish to get a quick sense of the state o…

I'm inclined to agree, and yet the past decade of ML on arxiv moving at a breakneck pace seems to be a counterexample. In that case I observe citation "bubbles" where I can follow one good paper up and down the citation graph to find others.
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