It has 10+ pages of references. More like a well researched lit review than a blog post with a few links.

Yes, but putting a link to a Google Form on the abstract is a bit too much.

It's arxiv, it's not a final version

I'd say the culture of scientific publishing precedes blogs by "a few" decades. There have always been papers that were blog-like in nature.

Consider the letters section of Phyicical Review, that turned into a weekly journal Physical Review Letters back in the 50s. It was a blog or forum back when papers were distributed on paper.

Basically because of the slow pace of review and publication the letters column became a way to talk about recent results or problems, and then follow up letters (i.e. comments on the blog posts) became common. So the editors decided to hive it off and speed up its publication schedule.

Thank **ing god! Hiding behind jargon and "the process" is an indicator of having nothing to say. I see this as a rolling up of the metaphorical sleeves, a sign that stuff is actually happening.

Always have been.

Yeah, wait for them to be twitter threads: 1/n - where (n >> 1).

What a strange recommendation. I do research in CS theory and machine learning and I try to find arXiv preprints when I can, they are usually more complete than conference versions of papers. If you stick to papers from authors you know or to those from well-known conferences, arXiv is often times the best source.

This is an extremely wrong viewpoint. "Many extremely important* papers have been published on arxiv alone - no other publisher. Just off the top of my head, without looking, ELMo from allenAI (the paper that started the contextualized representations revolution for BERT/attention) is only on arxiv.

That sounds highly misleading. It is the standard preprint site in many disciplines. So you should take it as seriously as any preprint and conversely if a published article is not on the arxiv, that would be suspicious.

Many of the best papers appear an Arxiv first. In some fields, it is customary to put your preprint on Arxiv before/during the submission to the peer reviewed venue.

Arxiv is vital for quickly developing research fields.

Eh, there are plenty of actual pre-prints you can find on arXiv. Typical flow is you find a paper of interest published elsewhere then search arXiv for the same title, authors, etc. and can even find related work. A lot of publication isn't doing much in terms of genuine peer review but formatting, catching minor errors like grammar, typo, missing references etc. arXiv is great as a legitimate source for valid information tucked behind a paywall. It's not the only option but it's one of them (checking the primary author's personal site, researchgate, or associated research institutions repositories are also there, as well as contacting the author directly).

So the math, physics, and computer science departments of every major university should be ignored? What a brain dead comment.

Serious and trustworthy research is done on peer reviewed journals, not websites where everyone can post whatever he/she wants

Serious and trustworthy according to whom, exactly?

The term peer review was virtually non-existent prior to the 1960s. And despite that, nearly everything in modern society can ultimately be attributed to breakthroughs that happened prior to the advent of peer-review.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=peer+review&ye...

Prior to the 1960s there was no internet.

I think you misunderstand how accessible the Internet was, and the history of open-access journals dating back to the late 40s. arXiv started in 1991. None of it explains why the peer review started surfacing in published books.

It does correlate perfectly with when modern scholars point to when the institutions were captured.

I extend the same courtesy to this site.