4 ms·
Add upvotes/downvotes to preprint servers. Weight voting power by the user’s subfield, dynamically determined by who’s upvoting them, PageRank style (so a scien
by MontyCarloHall 4y ago
Add upvotes/downvotes to preprint servers. Weight voting power by the user’s subfield, dynamically determined by who’s upvoting them, PageRank style (so a scientist who’s mostly upvoted by others working in numerical linear algebra would have a lot of voting power on a preprint describing a novel matrix factorization scheme, and very little voting power on a preprint describing a novel thread scheduling algorithm).
Take the top N upvoted preprints in a given field and showcase them at a conference for that field.
And to avoid hype cycles or gaming the system, make voting cost karma—if you choose to vote, you yourself lose some voting weight in the process, so votes would only be given out sparingly to papers that actually deserve them.
- nautilius 4y agoHaha, yeah no way anyone’s going to game that system! No way some clique recruits all of the voting power (collaborators to undergrads) to push their work through, all it takes is LeCun to simply read all papers and his vote will balance everything out!
- MontyCarloHall 4y agoEasy solution: make it so that voting costs karma, so individuals only have limited voting power.
- nautilius 4y agoEasy fix to your solution: get more people to vote. How about all 10000 undergrads in your institution? In your model, a modern day Einstein would have never had a chance; industrialized research, with publication mills and systematic co-authorship permutation is exactly what would flourish under your model.
- MontyCarloHall 4y ago10k undergrads would have few to no highly upvoted publications, and thus little to no voting power, even in aggregate. An even smaller fraction of them would have highly upvoted papers in the specific subfield of the paper they’re voting on, making their aggregated voting power even more worthless. The only way to game the system would be to somehow convince a ton of highly upvoted people in a given subfield to upvote a paper in that particular subfield (and give up some of their voting power accordingly, since voting would cost you karma). Heck, make it so that you can only vote on a certain number of papers each month (5-10?), to make votes even more valuable.
- malfist 4y agoDo we really need to turn publishing into reddit?
- MontyCarloHall 4y agoWhy not? You’re currently posting to a website that consistently curates high quality content via voting.
- DangitBobby 4y agoIt can work well in conjunction with good and empowered moderators.
- pessimizer 4y agoTrue, 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.
- xor99 4y agoYeah, why not. It's already like/comment/subscribe model via publishing online. This would add a dislike button and you could have it so it costs karma etc. Would be preferable imo.
- evouga 4y agoPlease no. Good science is often boring; this system prioritizes hype and marketing over everything else.
- MontyCarloHall 4y agoPlenty of good but “boring” articles make it to the top of HackerNews every day. Voting systems don’t have to devolve into Reddit.
- xhkkffbf 4y agoAnd how do you decide who votes and how many votes each person gets? A basic democracy favors the young, foolish masses. The goal of the journal system is to put the smart, seasoned academics in charge of choosing the best material.
- xor99 4y agoAnything like this is worth trying. Enhancing the reliability of peer-to-peer peer review on preprint servers so they become the de facto publishing base would be ideal. Think how many younger students could start publishing at undergrad and earlier.