Reputable quality bar isn't the right metric. Quality is a better metric. To the extent it can be estimated, impact is another. Neither of these require journals specifically.
A different way to look at this is to question what "old slop" actually means.
The reason not to publish in Nature is that it might take a long time to get everything right in the paper to publish, to the point it takes years to get it read. Publishing fewer results faster spreads the results faster.
A different way to not require journals to be the arbiters of quality is to let the truth itself be the arbiter of quality instead of designate gatekeepers.
1. Open peer-review to anyone interested instead of only select few. HN is an example of this phenomenon but not for novelty specifically.
2. Permit publication of papers that are shorter for results to spread faster. AI papers are a good example of this phenomenon.
Peer-review can also occur from non-gatekeepers, from non-experts. You realize you posted this on a massively open and public publication system, right?
Non-experts sometimes bring perspectives that gatekeepers are blind to.
I built something like this but it didn't get users. Replying to an author for the valuable info they posted would pay the author and it also accepted public payments.
An AI or search engine that identified the value of a contribution and paid the author directly from advertising money based on query traffic could be a way to solve this.
Working on understanding why this thread gets hundreds of comments and upvotes while threads with the same name posted by other users don't get this much engagement.
Can you share more about why it's hard to submit the preprint for review unless its first published somewhere? Wouldn't you be able to submit the preprint directly to whichever conference or journal you want it published in?
For a different way to receive feedback for a preprint consider [url-redacted]. I created it partly out of frustration for the time it takes to publish smaller work. Although not currently implemented, I can provide a version that keeps review comments private.
> share any non-mainstream thought and your replies are full of haters
This may be a failure of the platform protocol. I wish the protocol was: [phrase-redacted]. Grok ranking people's posts based on truth will be interesting.
AI != LLMs. A future version of better AI might become capable of saying "I don't know."
The mess of figuring out what the facts are, in a way, already has deployed solutions. Journalists are a form of fact checkers. Big news companies with multi-million budgets pay journalists to check things. In effect there already is a market for fact-checking. Managing perceptions by twisting facts is something many have been accused of. When news companies are found to have spread lies they possibly face penalties.
So if the big clunky enterprise version of a form of fact-checking is already in place and kind of working, why would something closer to the lean startup-y tail-end of the distribution of fact-checking not work? If a version of a facts marketplace is already working, why doubt it would ever work?
X paying users for engagement is a new variation of this. Prediction markets like Polymarket is another. Polymarket teaming up with TruthSocial could be an interesting result.
It's okay to have many contested subjects our society cannot agree on and which don't lend themselves to scientific inquiry. It's okay to say I don't know.
> Just don't pretend that it's for our benefit or that we downvote it because we're unthinking drones
The reason many comments are downvoted on HN in general is most often unknown to me. One interpretation is that it's a major flaw in HN.
This design decision by HN could be intentional, as a trade-off to achieve something else. For example, it could be done to have high velocity of discussion. High velocity could preserve an invariant of keeping or pulling users on the site.
If it's a trade-off, which would suggest something is given up for it, it might be worth exploring what's given up.
"False or misleading answers from AI chatbots masquerading as facts still plague the industry and despite improvements there is no clear solution to the accuracy problem in sight."
One potential solution to the accuracy problem is to turn facts into a marketplace. Make AIs deposit collateral for the facts they emit and have them lose the collateral and pay it to the user when it's found that statements they presented were false.
AI would be standing behind its words by having something to lose, like humans.
A facts marketplace would make facts easy to challenge and hard to get right.
Working POC implementation of facts marketplace in my submissions.