Inside ArXiv

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.

The power issue with platforms is a bit like with polities : sure, a platform might be great when ruled by an enlightened despot (and there's probably a survival bias here for the most enlightened ones ?), but that's only a small fraction of its life of domination, and what happens once the enlightened despot goes away (in one way or the other) ?

So it's probably better to not rely on platforms in the first place...