Distill Hiatus
distill.pub
distill.pub
A serious concern I have about self publishing (which doesn't appear to be addressed, hopefully I didn't miss it) is bit rot and long term format accessibility. arXiv (and traditional journals more generally) provides a reliable, versioned central repository. The contents appear in a predictable format and (mostly) adhere to an accepted set of styling conventions.
Today, you can retrieve scanned PDFs of many (most?) papers from the early 1900s. Other than the lack of color photographs and more simplistic figures, they're largely the same as their more modern counterparts. (But not quite - the lack of DOIs is downright painful.) I suspect that the entirety of arXiv will still be readily available in some form 100 years from now provided society doesn't suffer a total collapse; the same can't be said of a one off website as described in the article. (Perhaps versioning it on GitHub will prove to be enough?)
Related, probably the only frustration I had will Distill was that articles had a tendency to rely on assets hosted by third parties. Those are particularly prone to disappearing unexpectedly in my experience. I fear that one off websites will make this issue significantly more common.
Distill used a new medium and media, with all the good and bad that comes with it. In my view the biggest challenge is archiving to ensure readability and accessibility in 20, 200, 2000 years. We can read things written in parchment 2000 years ago, we should aspire to properly view digital media 2000 years from now. Yet 2 years from now much of digital media on the internet is already broken. The internet archive is humankind's savior in this regard, but we need to do more, better and faster (because so much digital content is being created and lost before we can save it...).
Regarding Distill specifically, short of a GitHub repo for each article archived in other mirrors, I don't see much else that is straightforward and flexible enough. Even the Distill arXiv idea mentioned would likely have to run on a combination of GitHub + mirrors...
As someone finishing a PhD, I think that doing LESS and doing it SLOWER is actually a very desirable thing for most of science. We are limited by how fast humans can wrap their heads around articles, and if we have fewer articles that are better written, that's a huge compound gain!
To the Distill team, if anyone is reading this: I don't think you should feel bad for being slow, or for doing "few" things at all. We humans to place big emphasis on superficial large numbers in the heat of the moment, but only good things withstand the test of time. I've only read a few Distill articles, but they were all really good and I can see myself coming back to most them 5-10 years from now. I don't think any other academic journal comes close in the ratio of (total goodness)/(total content). Good job Distill team for making a great thing, and summarizing the lessons learned so well in this goodbye article!
My only wish would be that you could find a way to continue to do auch good work that does not entirely rely on unpaid volunteering. In the end of the day volunteering only means some other institution bears the cost of supporting the volunteers.
For example: Could you get a Distill editor endowment to pay editors using donations throughout a non-profit fiscal sponsorship partner? Could you partner with a university, or even publisher, to support long term writing?
GOOD work takes TIME and is SLOW and we are bad at appreciating that. I hope the distill team keeps taking their time to put out good work, whatever it is they go do next!
Cheers to Distill!
> I don't think you should feel bad for being slow, or for doing "few" things at all.
Unfortunately, I think it's tricky to do this in a journal format. If you accept submissions, you'll have a constant flow of articles -- which vary greatly in quality -- who's authors very reasonably want timely help and a publication decision. And so it's very hard to go slow and do less, even if that's what would be right for you.
> Could you get a Distill editor endowment to pay editors using donations throughout a non-profit fiscal sponsorship partner? ...
I don't think funding is the primary problem. I'm personally fortunate to have a good job, and happily spend a couple thousand a year out of pocket to cover Distill's operating expenses.
I think the key problem is that Distill's structure means that we can't really control how much energy it takes from us, nor chose to focus our energy on the things about Distill that excites us.
I do understand that there is a lot of burden for editors. Also, from what I see - a lot of serious research now ends up on arXiv, and it does not matter if it gets published in a reviewed journal. (At least, in the last 2 years in deep learning, some breakthroughs are only as a PDF on OpenAI or as a website by Nvidia.)
Still - for static papers, it is acceptable to submit them to arXiv. For interactive ones, Distill is (was?) the only suitable venue.
On a more personal note, I am in the process of writing a paper (interactive, on tensor diagrams) for Distill. So well, it will end up as a blog post. It is OK-ish - most of my quality blog posts had orders of magnitude higher impact than my peer-reviewed papers. Still - a persistent DOI, editorial help from Chris Olah, would be game-changers.
[0] I'm sure there are more elegant ways to form these queries: https://gist.github.com/ludwigschubert/cd2bc4686e3fc6c8202c8...
[1] excluding editorial updates; if that still seems high: this includes every individual article in a "thread"; check out the [Differentiable Self-organizing Systems](https://distill.pub/2020/selforg/) thread, the [Circuits](https://distill.pub/2020/circuits/) thread, or the [Discussion of Adversarial Examples Are Not Bugs, They Are Features](https://distill.pub/2019/advex-bugs-discussion/).