If you know the authors of your specific area of research, arXiv is a nice way to read their new papers when they are (mostly) done but the submission to a journal is not finished yet.

Do people browse arxiv or monitor new posts like reddit or something? I only visit when I encounter a link to it or when I search for a specific paper.

Have you personally reviewed for big conferences or submitted and received reviews? It's a very noisy process that does toss out the lowest effort clueless stuff, but doesn't discriminate all that well between "meh" and "interesting", junior reviewers (the bulk) want proof of blood, sweat and tears. They want novel model modules and algo tweaks and complain about novelty that it's just A plus B, missing the point... They surely don't catch wrong results or incorrect claims because the catastrophic problems that invalidate papers are often in the implementation, not the nice math equations that motivate it.

In other words, Arxiv is what you use when you want to inform yourself on new research, conferences are for furthering your career by getting closer to your PhD graduation, expand your CV etc. And then to network and mingle with researchers in person and try to get hired.

One growing role, especially in mathematics, is that of a host for "overlay journals": https://www.insmi.cnrs.fr/en/cnrsinfo/epijournaux-en-mathema...

I really like the idea. In short: arXiv, HAL and similar sites host the papers without any peer review (short of perhaps stopping crank spam) or access control. They're freely available to anyone. Authors then submit arXiv IDs (or similar) to the reviewers of "overlay journals", which then review and accept or not. The overlay journal accepts a paper by just adding it to its list of accepted arXiv identifiers, and that's that.

This ensures accessibility for all, keeps peer review, yet takes a lot of the practical hurdles away from actually running a journal. A journal can now just be a group of people who give thumbs up or down to arXiv identifiers, and if that group's conclusion start having weight in the community then it's become an important journal. Maybe they give away their listings for free, maybe they charge to read the reviews – it's really up to them what the business model (if any) will be.

It's really nice.

It’s a useful tool. But its “value” is about the same as a github repo with your pdf.

It doesn’t need much funding or staff and not quite sure why they’re going through all this rigmarole and independence. I almost think they’d be better off like Apache where there ade very few employees.

Well, some blog posts are worth citing.

The bibliography is more important, imo, than the peer review. I get the most use of arxiv surfing references and citations.

Unless you are in research I would not bother; you are trying to drink from a firehose. Let other people do the curating for you.

"peer review is vital"

I suggest knowing some people who have written works for peer review and done peer review themselves.

Some people outside academia give peer review quite the undeserved aura.

There's a lot of trash on ArXiv, how much of it is in your diet should depend on your ability to evaluate the quality of research.

arXiv enables peer review!

arXiv users are the peers doing the review.

"Peer review" has existed for centuries before journals created their own bad for-profit version.

Actually arXiv is frustrating from an open access angel. It is very much possible to put up documents without open licensing so the content is not always fulfilling the open access definition.

Peer review WAS vital for a long time. Maybe the world looks different now, maybe LLMs can find value in things better than humans. When you make an assumption it's good to think about why you do so, in this case it seems to be for historical reasons.