[jltsiren]

Page limits force you to focus. As a researcher, you are often expected to communicate your ideas in 1 page, 3 pages, 10 pages, or 30 pages, for various purposes. If a journal asks for a 10-page paper, you write a 10-page paper. If a conference asks for a 1-page abstract, you write a 1-page abstract. Most people reading a paper are not interested in going through all the details, and those details should usually not be in the main paper.

It's also easier to find reviewers for short papers than for long ones.

Some the issues you mention are specific to CS conferences. Because there is only time for 1-2 rounds of reviews, the reviews focus more on accepting/rejecting the paper and less on clearing any misunderstandings before judging it. Conferences are are also more likely to have one-size-fits-all page limits, while journals often have several catagories of papers with different expectations of length.

[godelski]

> Page limits force you to focus.

This can be solved in better ways, which is, in fact, reviewers. I'm okay with a soft requirement but a standardization is what I'm getting at as being problematic. Some papers are noisy because they should be 3 pages but are 10. Some papers are noisy because they are 10 pages and should be 30. There is no universal rule, and that's what I'm getting at.

> It's also easier to find reviewers for short papers than for long ones.

That's a separate problem that needs to be addressed, but is not easy.

> Some the issues you mention are specific to CS conferences.

Yes, but the author here is CS and we are on a CS focused website. But in general what I said isn't specific to conferences. If conferences are the problem then let's abandon them in favor of good science instead of keeping them around (or turn them into being meetup focused). Certainly the lack of back and forth between authors and reviewers is not a meaningful review process (most author rebuttals are limited to one page and often reviewers are not aligned in critiques). Are we all on the same team (better science) or strictly competing against one another?

[jltsiren]

If the paper does not fit reasonably within the page limit, you should submit it to another venue. If you can't write a meaningful 10-page version of a 30-page paper, you probably can't give a meaningful 25-minute talk on it either. You should submit it directly to a journal that accepts long papers.

Some conferences also have special tracks for short papers, and some journals publish "letters" instead of or in addition to full-length papers.

[godelski]

> If you can't write a meaningful 10-page version of a 30-page paper, you probably can't give a meaningful 25-minute talk on it either.

I can't really tell what's going on here anymore but I don't think we're having a conversation. You're just describing something that's not in good faith here. You're letting "meaningful" do the heavy lifting here. Yes, of course everyone can distill a paper, but not every paper can be distilled and then accepted into publication. Frankly, because reviewers act like exactly this and place weird arbitrary bars on what it means to be good work forgetting that all works are incomplete and thus encouraging embellishing and lying and setting continually new absurd bars.

Stop doing gymnastics to protect a system or just respond to my actual critiques. There's no perfect system so you can even say my critiques are valid yet not enough of a concern to abandon or modify our current system. It's not an all or nothing situation here. But I don't need to be lectured on something this silly as "if you can't do it in 10 pages, you aren't doing it right." My claim was that there isn't a one size fits all standard. I stand buy that. You can respond to what I wrote but there's not a good "teaching moment" here.

If you just want to tell me how I'm wrong without listening to my actual concern then don't comment. You're creating noise and just an angrier internet. If you think I have failed to consider something and that thing is important, do lay it out. But communicate what that actually is rather than just saying "dumb." Give a real critique. The same goes for when you review. Don't be reviewer 2. Reviewer 2 just holds back science.

[jltsiren]

My point was that if a paper needs 30 pages, don't submit it to a conference. That makes as little sense as submitting an algorithms paper to a zoology journal. Conferences are centered around talks, and you can't present a long paper adequately in a short talk.

Journals can be more flexible than conferences. They don't need page limits, because they don't have the physical constraints imposed by conference dates and the number of parallel tracks. But journals also have audiences, and audience expectations are more important than your paper. You should take those expectations into account when choosing the journal. Don't send an algorithms paper to a zoology journal, and don't send a long paper to a journal that focuses on short papers.

Write the paper first, and then choose a journal or a conference that publishes papers like that. Just as there is no single page limit that fits all papers, there is no single venue that publishes papers of all lengths.

[sideshowb]

I think desirability of page limits is very subject specific. Some people will just waffle if you don't give them a page limit. Other times it means there's not room for the technical details.

[godelski]

But the reviewers can reject if it isn't enough or reject if it is too much. What I'm arguing is the alignment mechanism already exists. The page limit is over constraining