But you can choose to not trust people that are part of citation rings.

I would have thought that those participants who are published in peer-reviewed journals could be be used as a trust anchor - see, for example, the Advogato algorithm as an example of a somewhat bad-faith-resistant metric for this purpose: https://web.archive.org/web/20170628063224/http://www.advoga...

But if you have a citation ring and one of the paper goes down as being fraudulent it reflects extremely bad on all people that endorsed it. So it's a bad strategy (game theory wise) to take part in such rings.

Maybe getting caught causes the island to be shut out and papers automatically invalidated if there aren't sufficient real endorsers.

Unless you can be fooled into trusting a fake endorser, that island might just as well not exist.

A web of trust is transitive, meaning that the endorsers are known. It would be trivial to add negative weight to all endorsers of a known-fake paper, and only sightly less trivial to do the same for all endorsers of real papers artificially boosted by such a ring.

I mean if you skip the traditional publishing gates, you could in theory endorse articles that specifically bring out sections from other articles that you agree or disagree with. Would be a different form of article

Surely they rely on scale? Or did I get whooshed??

I have a userscript to actually hide my own karma because I always think it is useless but your point is good actually. But also I think that karma/comment ratio is better than absolute karma. It has its own problems but it is just better. And I would ask if you can share the userscript.

And to bring this back to the original arxiv topic. I think reputation system is going to face problems with some people outside CS lack of enough technical abilities. It also introduce biases in that you would endorse people who you like for other reasons. Actually some of the problems are solved and you would need careful proposal. But the change for publishing scheme needs push from institutions and funding agencies. Authors don't oppose changes but you have a lobby of the parasitic publishing cartel that will oppose these changes.

Yes, HN should probably publish karma divided by #comments. Or at least show both numbers.

> The problem is identifying _untrustworthy_ authors.

Is it though? Should we care about authors or about the work? Yes, many experiments are hard to reproduce, but isn't that something we should work towards, rather than just "trust" someone. People change. People do mistakes. I think more open data, open access, open tools, will solve a lot, but my guess is that generally people do not like that because it can show their weaknesses - even if they are well intentioned.

You can create an arXiv.org account with basically any email address whatsoever[0], with no referral. What you can't necessarily do is upload papers to arXiv without an "endorsement"[1]. Some accounts are given automatic endorsements for some domains (eg, math, cs, physics, etc) depending on the email address and other factors.

Loosely speaking, the "received wisdom" has generally been that if you have a .edu address, you can probably publish fairly freely. But my understanding is that the rules are a little more nuanced than that. And I think there are other, non .edu domains, where you will also get auto-endorsed. But they don't publish a list of such things for obvious reasons.

[0]: Unless things have changed since I created my account, which was originally created with my personal email address. That was quite some time ago, so I guess it's possible changes have happened that I'm not aware of.

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

Not quite true. If you've got an email associated with a known organization you can submit.

Which includes some very large ones like @google.com

If your goal is exclusively reducing strain of overloaded editors, then that's just a side effect that you might tolerate :)

I'm not sure everyone got my hint that the proposal is obviously very bad,

(1) because ivy league also produces a lot of work that's not so great (i.e. wrong (looking at you, Ariely) or un-ambitious) and

(2) because from time to time, some really important work comes out of surprising places.

I don't think we have a good verdict on the Orthega hypothesis yet, but I'm not a professional meta scientist.

That said, your proposal seems like a really good idea, I like it! Except I'd apply it to individuals and/or labs.

Not reviewing an upload which turns out to be LLM slop is precisely the kind of thing you want to track with a reputation system