[bonoboTP]

Make it an external service then, and leave the thing that's already working great to just be.

The reason authors like and use arxiv is that it gives 1) a timestamp, 2) a standardized citable ID, and 3) stable hosting of the pdf. And readers like the no-nonsense single click download of the pdf and a barebones consistent website look.

All else is a side show.

[OneDeuxTriSeiGo]

You have to keep in mind that an increasing portion of their time and labor is going towards moderation and filtering due to a mass influx of nonsensical AI generated papers, non-academic numerology-tier hackery, and other useless drivel.

Spinning the service off forces other the labor out onto other universities rather than leaving them to solely Cornell

[bonoboTP]

Is the problem the storage cost for hosting them, the HDDs? I'm sure they can be offloaded to cold storage because most of that slop won't be opened by anyone.

Arxiv doesn't need moderation. Nobody is asking for Arxiv moderation. It needs minimal checks to remove overtly illegal content.

[swiftcoder]

> Arxiv doesn't need moderation. Nobody is asking for Arxiv moderation

Seems like a lot of people are asking for moderation. And moderation is a pretty big part of the existing offering[1].

[1]: https://info.arxiv.org/help/moderation/index.html

[efreak]

When you stop moderating input, that's when someone builds a fuse filesystem on top of it. We had those for discord (dsfs), twitterfs, redditfs, yt-media-storage, etc. It's also when someone starts using it to distribute malware, like websites built on a combination of GitHub and a cdn.

[bonoboTP]

We are talking about a different kind of moderation. People want to filter out incorrect information that in their opinion damages the reputation of Arxiv, eg covid stuff. It's not about dumping binary data.

This is a motte and bailey fallacy. The real question is about moderation with the goal of checking truth and the scientific content. Obviously illegal content and ddos type overloading attacks need to be blocked.

Very different philosophies are clashing here. Arxiv came about in an age of different zeitgeist. We may never get back to that moment.

[OneDeuxTriSeiGo]

> Is the problem the storage cost for hosting them, the HDDs?

No. Around half the cost is infrastructure. The other half of the cost is people. i.e. engineers to maintain infra and build mod tools for moderators to operate.

> Arxiv doesn't need moderation. Nobody is asking for Arxiv moderation.

This is just not true. Tons of people ask for arxiv to have moderation. Especially since covid, etc when antivaxxers and alternative medicine peddlers started trying to pump the medical categories of arxiv with quack science preprints and then go on to use the arxiv preprint and its DOI to take advantage of non academics who don't really understand what arxiv is other than it looks vaguely like a journal.

And doubly so now that people keep submitting AI generated slop papers to the service trying to flood the different categories so they can pad their resumes or CVs. And on top of that people who don't actually understand the fields they are trying to write papers in using AI to generate "innovative papers" that are completely nonsensical but vaguely parroting the terms of art.

The only reason you don't see more people calling for arxiv moderation is because they already spend so much time on it. If they were to stop moderating the site it would overflow into an absolute nightmare of garbage near overnight. And people wouldn't be upset with the users uploading this of course, they'd be upset with arxiv for failing to take action.

Moderation is inherently unappreciated because in the ideal form it should be effectively invisible (which arxiv's mostly is).

If you want to see the type of stuff that arxiv keeps out, go over to ViXrA [1] or you can watch k-theory's video [2] having fun digging through some of the quality posts that live over on that site.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViXra

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1at9BjQP8CI