3 ms·

My dream would be arxiv hosting a reddit-style upvote/downvote discussion thread for every paper. I've seen this work beautifully on some science subreddits, as

My dream would be arxiv hosting a reddit-style upvote/downvote discussion thread for every paper. I've seen this work beautifully on some science subreddits, as well as on Scot Aaranson and Terence Tao's blogs. It can really help flesh out problems/questions, generate intelligent discussion, and even lead to cooperation between participants on further research. One requirement for it to work is strong moderation to keep the discussion focused.

Angostura 3y ago
Sounds like a job for a dedicated Lemmy/kbin instance
- downWidOutaFite 3y ago
  Maybe, but you really want all the discussion easily discoverable and in a central authoritative place to encourage experts in the field to find and join the conversation.
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    Isn't that implied by "dedicated instance" regardless of "lemmy"?
  - Angostura 3y ago
    I’m just saying that Lemmy or kbin software gives you the tools to build just that quite easily
ISL 3y ago
ArXiv has deliberately left the implementation of such systems to others. There's nothing stopping anyone from making such an overlay, should they choose to do so (and many have tried).
- amelius 3y ago
  The problem that you get then is fragmentation. Everybody will be on a different service, and the discussions don't get off the ground.
  - ISL 3y ago
    Prestigious journals, assuming reasonable editors, can spontaneously emerge and attract submissions. Authors publish in journals based upon some combination of 1) editorial quality, 2) whether or not everyone else in their field publishes in it, and 3) prestige. 2 and 3 are self-reinforcing effects -- why does Nature attract prestigious papers? Because it publishes prestigious papers. Why does Nature attract high-quality research? Because it is full of high-quality research. All of this is to say that it is likely that, given a distribution of reasonably-edited arXiv-overlay journals, there's a pretty good chance that just a few of them in any given field (or at large) will attract most of the serious work
abdullahkhalids 3y ago
Scirate [1] is an arxiv overlay with upvotes (called scites) and a comment section. The scite function does quite help a lot with bubbling up the better papers to the top. But I have never seen any serious discussion in the comments section - only clarifying questions, or missed citations. [1] https://scirate.com/arxiv/quant-ph https://scirate.com/arxiv/quant-ph (go to previous day to see more scites)

Angostura 3y ago

Sounds like a job for a dedicated Lemmy/kbin instance

downWidOutaFite 3y ago
Maybe, but you really want all the discussion easily discoverable and in a central authoritative place to encourage experts in the field to find and join the conversation.
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  Isn't that implied by "dedicated instance" regardless of "lemmy"?
- Angostura 3y ago
  I’m just saying that Lemmy or kbin software gives you the tools to build just that quite easily

ISL 3y ago

ArXiv has deliberately left the implementation of such systems to others. There's nothing stopping anyone from making such an overlay, should they choose to do so (and many have tried).

amelius 3y ago
The problem that you get then is fragmentation. Everybody will be on a different service, and the discussions don't get off the ground.
- ISL 3y ago
  Prestigious journals, assuming reasonable editors, can spontaneously emerge and attract submissions. Authors publish in journals based upon some combination of 1) editorial quality, 2) whether or not everyone else in their field publishes in it, and 3) prestige. 2 and 3 are self-reinforcing effects -- why does Nature attract prestigious papers? Because it publishes prestigious papers. Why does Nature attract high-quality research? Because it is full of high-quality research. All of this is to say that it is likely that, given a distribution of reasonably-edited arXiv-overlay journals, there's a pretty good chance that just a few of them in any given field (or at large) will attract most of the serious work

abdullahkhalids 3y ago

Scirate [1] is an arxiv overlay with upvotes (called scites) and a comment section. The scite function does quite help a lot with bubbling up the better papers to the top. But I have never seen any serious discussion in the comments section - only clarifying questions, or missed citations. [1] https://scirate.com/arxiv/quant-ph https://scirate.com/arxiv/quant-ph (go to previous day to see more scites)