dougmccune

This was studying Facebook circa 2004-2006. That version of Facebook was laughably basic at that point. If I remember right it was a chronological list of posts on your wall. There was no algorithmic feed. Hell, the news feed at all was only launched in late 2006. There was no video. There were no ads. Nobody made content hoping to get rich and outrage didn’t sell. If only we could go back to such an innocent time.

You might want to dig into what ResearchHub is up to https://www.researchhub.com/

If you ignore the web3/crypto aspect, they’ve got a decent start on what seems like a reasonably similar platform. They do all their dev and community building out in the open, so you can join their Discord and listen in on their community calls, etc. Might at least give you some ideas on what to target or avoid.

I spent 3 years living in one of the co-ops briefly mentioned in the article ("In 2013, the administration took over the student-run anarchist house and painted over the old murals."). I wouldn't call it an "anarchist house" but it sure as hell was a lot of fun to live there. I painted some of those murals that are now apparently gone. We built a giant illegal loft in our room to make it two stories (which we would disassemble for a day every year when the fire inspection happened). We did some stupid and illegal shit, sure. But the sense of community was unparalleled. The alumni association owned the house, so we had to deal with all the maintenance. We came back to campus a week before everyone else every year to work on the house. We cooked and cleaned for ourselves. I've never since experienced anything close to that same feeling of communal pride. It was a mess, but it was our beautiful mess.

I recently got my first Apple Watch with a cellular plan specifically so I can leave my phone at home and still be reachable via phone and text message. Mostly it’s great. The watch barely works well enough as a phone, I can play Spotify, Apple Maps kind of works for directions (not nearly as well as Google maps on the phone IMO), and that’s basically all that’s usable, which is nice.

However, when dropping off my kid at school they require a Covid screening app (phone only) that you have to show every morning. I got half way to Whole Foods before turning back realizing I needed my phone to scan the Amazon Prime code to get better prices.

I expect more and more everyday activities will require smartphones sadly.

I know folks are disagreeing with you a bit in this thread, but I just wanted to say that I 100% agree with you. 17 year-old me could have written the same words after the loss of my mom. I know loss. I will never know your loss. To me, that acknowledgment is a show of respect.

Agree. And we haven’t even mentioned the new normal of the yearly smoke-filled skies from the increasingly severe wildfires.

All I was trying to do was push back on the bleak vision of boarded up commerce-less, restaurant-less, people-less streets being roamed by criminals, addicts, and the mentally ill. Yes, we have all sorts of issues, but the scene outside is much more like pre-pandemic life than the Walking Dead.

Homelessness has definitely increased in the last 2 years, as it has throughout all of California. The high cost of housing and income inequality are absolutely massive problems that have gotten significantly worse since the onset of the pandemic. We certainly have problems, and housing costs and drug overdoses are absolutely serious issues that are trending the wrong way. But to claim that Berkeley is a ghost town with almost no retail and half of restaurants shuttered is just pure fiction. I drove through campus the other day and a group of kids was playing beer pong on their front lawn. People are everywhere. The commercial areas are back with foot traffic. It’s not anything like the original commenter described. It’s like they went out once in March 2020 and then never left the house again.

This is so far from reality I have a hard time even knowing how to respond. Just in case people who don’t live here think the Bay Area cities have become this dystopian hell hole as described, no, they absolutely have not. Life is honestly nearly back to normal. I’m going out to dinner with a friend in Berkeley tonight. The streets will not be empty or filled with drug addicts.

This is probably just grass is greener stuff, but I've seen the opposite. Now, that said, this was post acquisition, but my anecdote is that in our case the ICs were shielded from all the office politics shenanigans and were able to just focus on delivering work. Meanwhile, those in management positions were repeatedly pulled into agenda-less meetings, were "voluntold" for tasks unrelated to their jobs, and were generally unhappy. Obviously it all depends on the culture within an organization. But in our case we worked really hard to shield the ICs from the BS, but those in management bore the brunt, and the burn out and resignations reflected that.

It’s not paywalled. OP probably saw the name Elsevier and assumed it was paywalled, but it’s open access and licensed CC BY.

The article wasn’t about Messenger Kids though. If you click through to the actual slide deck that was leaked it shows that the current status quo is that Messenger Kids is the only product in the portfolio that is available for kids. The future state they envision is one in which all their products are available to kids, but tailored for those users. So that means IG and FB.

I’m a parent of a 9 year old and 7 year old. My 9 yo has Messenger Kids. I agree it’s a pretty well designed app. But it’s just messaging (and some games). It’s like the telephone. I don’t mind that. But IG and FB are different things entirely. My concern isn’t that my kid can chat with his friends. It’s in the compare and despair, the constant posting of fake versions of your perfect life to make others feel jealous, and the algorithmic promotion of outrage (sorry, I mean high engagement) content.

Yes! This was a huge lesson I learned as well. You can spend days going back and forth over email with a customer trying to figure out wtf they're doing. They get irritated that you're not getting it, you get irritated that they're not explaining things right. All can be solved with a quick phone call or screen sharing. But younger folks new to support are often really hesitant to pick up the phone. Just pick up the phone!

> It's almost like there's something cultural happening in America that's making everyone assume the worst when interacting with people they don't know...

My take on this is that most US firms have outsourced first tier tech support to non-native English speakers who have fairly useless scripts they have to run through. You're dealing with a human (sometimes), but it's about the equivalent of dealing with a robot. It's hard to remember to have empathy when whatever you say is met with a standard, often nonsensical readout of the next thing in their script. So I think we've trained people to expect a horrible first tier experience.

That said, I've done a lot of B2B enterprise software support and have found exactly the same thing as you. Initial emails or calls will come in and the tone is aggressive and impatient. I think this stems from the assumption that the response will be useless (until maybe it gets escalated 3 times to someone actually useful). But when you respond as a capable human who legitimately is trying to help them out (and not just pass them on to someone else), suddenly the tone totally changes and you have wonderful interactions. People are incredibly appreciative. Nobody is used to a support person actually solving their problem. Hell, they're not even used to someone replying to them at all most of the time. The bar is on the floor. So when you exceed that bar and actually help someone quickly and efficiently, they turn into super fans.

I live in Oakland. This incident seems to be back in early March. Back then the large vaccination sites were all listed on myturn.ca.gov (ie the Oakland Coliseum). They'd post new batches of appointments and they would be all booked really fast (within minutes or hours). But Curative was also running vaccinations sites in Oakland and Berkeley. They weren't listed on the myturn website, so people didn't know about them. They would post new appointments and they would be available for days, sometimes even available right up until the appointment time. This was during the time when you had to be 65+ or have a health condition. In my social circle there were many ineligible people sending links around for the Curative appointments. There was definitely a mentality of "there are so many open appointments, they're just going to go unused." Whether that was true or not I don't know, but there was definitely a reality that certain vaccine sites that were not integrated into the central database had tons of openings, while people who didn't know how to find the secret links were left to reload myturn.ca.gov constantly hoping to find appointments. It was also public knowledge that nobody ever checked that you qualified with a valid medical condition. So getting a vaccine appointment at that time for a totally healthy 25 year old was as simple as someone texting you a link and clicking a single checkbox to say you had a medical condition. In my small social circle, I know of that happening at least a few times.

This is part of what https://scite.ai/ is doing. They categorize citations as supporting, detracting, or neutral. The theory being you want to know if you’re citing something debunked. Scite also flags citations of retracted papers (and a Twitter bot that tweets when a new paper is published that cites a retracted study). And I think they have zotero integration (?)

I have no affiliation other than I have met the founder and think the product is cool.

Uhhh, are we looking at the same S1? Coursera currently loses money, has never been profitable, and does not provide any indication of when or if they will ever be profitable.

From the S1:

We incurred net losses of $46.7 million and $66.8 million in 2019 and 2020, respectively, and we had an accumulated deficit of $343.6 million as of December 31, 2020. We expect to incur significant losses in the future. We will need to generate and sustain increased revenue levels in future periods to achieve profitability, and even if we achieve profitability, we may not be able to maintain or increase our level of profitability. We anticipate that our operating expenses will increase substantially for the foreseeable future as we continue to, among other things...

These expenditures will make it more difficult for us to achieve and maintain profitability. Our efforts to grow our business may be more costly than we expect, and we may not be able to increase our revenue enough to offset our higher operating expenses. If we are forced to reduce our expenses, it could negatively impact our growth and growth strategy. As a result, we can provide no assurance as to whether or when we will achieve profitability. If we are not able to achieve and maintain profitability, the value of our company and our common stock could decline significantly, and you could lose some or all of your investment.

Lots of comments here about academic journals. This announcement is about monographs, not journals. Monographs are books. Usually small print runs, as they are niche and targeted for specific academic disciplines. The target audience is other academics and distribution is heavily through academic libraries. Think of dissertations when you’re completing a PhD.

For the analogy to work it's not even enough for the roads to be used to commit crimes. The roads would have to be continuously re-routing you from your intended destination and taking you down roadways filled with signs inciting violence, cult indoctrination, and lies about reality.

The algorithmic curation of all social media platforms that is intentionally built to assault users with the most distasteful, extreme lies (because it's good for engagement!) is the real problem in my view. If every social media platform stopped all algorithmic curation/recommendation and simply presented a chronological list of updates from people you follow (and did not recommend who to follow), then I think the bulk of the problem goes away.

I have no problem with free speech (even abhorrent speech). But I have a problem when a person's online experience is controlled by algorithms specifically designed to ratchet up the garbage and inundate people with hateful rhetoric.

> While many wealthy philanthropists enlist an army of publicists to trumpet their donations, Feeney went to great lengths to keep his gifts secret.

Seems like that was by design.

I think the thesis is that if you can spread your risk out across 100 companies then the math can work out and it can be a good bet, because you only need one of those to be a huge success and make up for all the failures. But if you are only invested in one startup, it's a horrible bet. So it can definitely make rational sense for the VC but not for the founders.

The corollary is that taking vast VC money is the best way to grow to be a $1B business (obviously there are some exceptions). Again, all these things can be true. If you're a founder and determined to have a billion dollar company, you should take VC money. But your chances of success are miniscule. If, on the other hand, you're a founder and just want to build a $20m business, don't take VC money and the odds improve dramatically.

Your lab only has to pay grad students $7,500 a year? Seems like that might be the number that’s out of whack in the equation. To be fair, I live in the Bay Area, where $7,500 only gets you like 3-4 months rent.

> The crux of this entire problem is that nobody knows how much it really costs to run a journal in the digital age. Or at least they're not telling. I'm not talking about costs excluding unpaid volunteers. I mean the full cost.

I know you're asking about the full cost including the time of the people working for free, which you're right, is an impossible number to get. But I fail to fully see your point. The new journal that's going to be run by MIT Press isn't going to start paying editors and reviewers any differently than Elsevier (meaning not paying them).

To answer one of your questions, the article mentions they are indeed going to try to charge less for APCs ($600-800 instead of $1,800), and they're going to be fully OA, but those are the only major changes.

But to part of your question about the cost of publishing, PLOS publishes their financials [1], as does eLife [2]. eLife published 1,307 papers in 2017 and had total expenses of 5.3m GBP (~6.9m USD) for an average per-article expense of $5,244. PLOS published ~27,000 articles in 2016 [3] and had total expenses of $42.8m USD for an average per-article expense of ~$1,500. These of course aren't apples to apples comparisons, since what they're trying to do with this journal isn't the same as what PLOS does or what eLife does. But I think those are some good ballparks to understand what the range kind of looks like.

[1] https://www.plos.org/financial-overview

[2] https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/50d52087/annual-repor...

[3] https://www.plos.org/files/PLOS-Annual-Update-2016-online.pd...

I agree with the bulk of your post, but I feel the need to point out your statement that you have to pay to be indexed in ISI and get an impact factor is false. I've never heard of anyone paying for getting a ranking.

I think there's enough frustration to go around. I don't doubt your story. The life of an academic (especially a young, non-tenured academic) is brutal.

To provide a frustrating anecdote from the publisher's side: we'd love to heavily invest in launching new open access journals (which we do, but we'd love to do even more). The problem with launching a new journal (either subscription or OA) is that nobody will publish in it if it doesn't have an impact factor. Impact factor is controlled by a private, for-profit company (Clarivate) that's owned by a private equity firm. Getting an impact factor takes 3-5 years and also relies on the total crapshoot of what Clarivate decides to list or not list. So the prospect of launching a new OA journal is one where you are guaranteed to lose money for the first 3-5 years and then you have to put all your eggs in the impact factor basket, hope you get listed and receive an impact factor, and only after all that will academics choose your journal over any established legacy brand. And all this because at some point academia decided that they'd outsource academic career assessment to the magic number that is Impact Factor.

I also want to thank you and the other commenters for some good discourse here. This has been refreshing and I was only called an asshole once the whole time! But jokes aside, a sincere thanks :)

OA journals are a middleman too. They typically charge, just in a different way. In fact, popular OA journals can have much higher profit margins than your average subscription journal. If you're advocating for free publishing (whether OA or not) I'd challenge the belief that a system can scale to the current needs of the academic community without charging someone (institutions, governments, authors) and fees of some kind. You can certainly make the argument that the world would be a better place with all actors in the endeavor being non-profits, but that still doesn't at all mean free publishing.

Yes?

One thing to think about is what happens to academic fields that are not well funded? Plan S makes sense for funded research in STM disciplines. If we accept that publishing does cost some amount of money then it seems reasonable to have the funding of the research also cover that cost. Obviously we can argue about what a reasonable cost is ($100? $500? $5,000?), but it's certainly non-zero (even though yes, you can find specific examples of zero-cost publishing, but not on a scale that works for the system as a whole).

But what about the humanities and social sciences, which are typically not funded by government or foundation grants? We currently have a system in which the expectation of the academics is that they can publish for free because the universities pay for that cost via subscriptions. Changing to an author-pays model, which Plan S seems to push the industry toward, doesn't work for a lot of academic fields. There are certainly alternatives, like university libraries converting some of the funding they currently use for subscriptions to cover publication costs, or entire governments covering all publication costs for every academic within their borders. But it's not as easy to see exactly how the non-zero cost of publishing is covered outside well-funded disciplines.

I certainly made a broad generalization, but in this HN discussion you can find people asking why we can't just have a simple HN or Stack Overflow-like site for upvotes and downvotes instead of the existing peer review system (implying that it would be trivial to apply the tech used for social discourse online to academic publishing) and another comment about spinning up a peer-to-peer BitTorrent approach to distributing digitally signed data. And in every discussion of the topic on HN that I've read someone always asks the same type of question about why this is still a problem when it should be trivial to apply software tech toward a solution. My intent wasn't to discourage folks brainstorming technical improvements for the system, it was only to point out for anyone who isn't entrenched in the intricacies that there's a lot of reasons for the dysfunctional system to both exist and persist.

I hear you and it's a totally valid point. We could start paying reviewers tomorrow. I'm not convinced that adding a monetary incentive to the peer review process doesn't have its own serious negative consequences, but I'm certainly open to the idea that that's a potentially better version of the system than what we have now. It's certainly a difficult business decision to push through, given the universal lack of anyone doing so industry-wide, but that doesn't make it the wrong thing to do, and it certainly could be a differentiating factor if done well (ie by speeding up the review process a publisher might be able to increase author satisfaction and also increase article output, which in an OA world has a direct revenue impact).

I do have an issue calling it a monopoly, however. At best you can call it an oligopoly. The top 5 publishers publish about half the total articles each year [1]. So half the research is published by a combination of hundreds of smaller publishers (both for-profit and not) or independent scholarly societies. And then within the top publishers, they are absolutely in competition with each other, which becomes readily apparent when you dig into the royalty deals that publishers offer scholarly societies for the rights to publish their journals, which continue to get richer for the societies (which poses a whole different interesting problem in terms of the collateral damage to modern-day scholarly societies if or when the business model blows up).

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Right, sorry for the confusion. I was responding to two separate items in the question. One was the price, the other was the age of the article. I thought the question was clearly asking about both. Question 1: is $40 fair? Question 2: is that price (or potentially any price) fair for an article over 30 years old? My opinion is that $40 is not a fair price for a single article, and yet it's required to make the subscription business model work. And my second opinion is that the duration of copyright should be shorter. Obviously these opinions are in conflict with the business with which I'm involved, and are certainly not shared by most others within the industry.