The article has a melancholic tone running through it, felt especially keenly when you consider it a microcosm of the much wider struggles of maintaining a public good: sustaining it while keeping its integrity.
When your service is small or not easily visible - while still doing significant good - it's hard to find enough people willing to spend their time and resources helping you sustain it.
When your service becomes big enough to be noticeable - which is the arXiv is in by now - it also becomes attractive to the people looking to subvert it to be something else, to enshittify it, and so the limiting factor in getting help becomes the risk to its integrity.
arXiv has one of my papers on hold for a long time because their team couldn't believe I—someone without a CS degree—was able to create a programming language from scratch on my own.
We're in a political climate where scientific institutions are under threat, so of course they will loudly justify their own existence and value. It'd be irresponsible of them not to. That's not all that similar to a company being acquired and subsequently squeezed for value. ArXiv isn't a loss leader for a venture backed firm.
arXiv has nothing to gain by a PR blitz. Any academic knows what is arXiv exactly for, and there is no intention to grow user base or whatever. It's not a social media.
Not sure I agree with the comment you're responding to. But the article discusses some of their funding troubles, and the main mage of arxiv.org itself has a donate link. So I think perhaps the media presence might be motivated by a desire to fundraise (and IMO they absolutely deserve funding because of the important work they do).
You're right. I didn't consider the funding angle at all, but only the accusation of "enshittification" which usually comes from a VC or an entity that wants to generate more profits by expanding. On the other hand, I do think Simons Foundations would not let arXiv die. Also, I don't agree that arXiv's media presence has ulterior motives after all. It might just be that it's getting its share of fame.
https://archive.ph/2025.03.27-115038/https://www.wired.com/s...
http://web.archive.org/web/20250419005938/https://www.wired....
ArXiv: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv
ArXiv accepts .ps (PostScript), .tex (LaTeX source), and .pdf (PDF) ScholarlyArticle uploads.
ArXiv docs > Formats for text of submission: https://info.arxiv.org/help/submit/index.html#formats-for-te...
The internet and the web are the most transformative platforms in all of science, though.
The article has a melancholic tone running through it, felt especially keenly when you consider it a microcosm of the much wider struggles of maintaining a public good: sustaining it while keeping its integrity.
When your service is small or not easily visible - while still doing significant good - it's hard to find enough people willing to spend their time and resources helping you sustain it.
When your service becomes big enough to be noticeable - which is the arXiv is in by now - it also becomes attractive to the people looking to subvert it to be something else, to enshittify it, and so the limiting factor in getting help becomes the risk to its integrity.
arXiv has one of my papers on hold for a long time because their team couldn't believe I—someone without a CS degree—was able to create a programming language from scratch on my own.
> I learned Fortran in the 1960s, and real programmers didn’t document
I have a reason to believe that this is not the first time I heard this argument coming from a boomer physicist.
ArXiv has been on a PR blitz lately. Enshittification incoming. At least they lasted longer than GitHub.
We're in a political climate where scientific institutions are under threat, so of course they will loudly justify their own existence and value. It'd be irresponsible of them not to. That's not all that similar to a company being acquired and subsequently squeezed for value. ArXiv isn't a loss leader for a venture backed firm.
arXiv has nothing to gain by a PR blitz. Any academic knows what is arXiv exactly for, and there is no intention to grow user base or whatever. It's not a social media.
Not sure I agree with the comment you're responding to. But the article discusses some of their funding troubles, and the main mage of arxiv.org itself has a donate link. So I think perhaps the media presence might be motivated by a desire to fundraise (and IMO they absolutely deserve funding because of the important work they do).
You're right. I didn't consider the funding angle at all, but only the accusation of "enshittification" which usually comes from a VC or an entity that wants to generate more profits by expanding. On the other hand, I do think Simons Foundations would not let arXiv die. Also, I don't agree that arXiv's media presence has ulterior motives after all. It might just be that it's getting its share of fame.