> Have you ever seen an original physical copy of, say, Einstein's annus mirabilis papers? I haven't. I suspect that these are extremely rare and valuable collectors items and only trained archivists are even allowed to handle them.

I'm not sure that they're collector's items, but they're probably not in that many university libraries. For example, the University of Michigan library has a physical copy in its special collection, but my university's considerably smaller library does not. But that's just because of age: this is a 119-year-old paper; were it a little younger, say, about 70 years, it would be in my university's holdings. I think that's a considerably different order of magnitude of its lifetime from a Discord link that I'd be absolutely astounded to see last a decade, and that in practice will probably last much less time than that.

What difference does it make if the original lasts a year or a century? The original is irrelevant except for historical purposes. What matters from a scientific point of view is that the results withstand scrutiny, and that they are reliably replicated and accessible.

We discover new approaches to replication all the time. Have you never come across foundational papers and arguments that everyone loved at the time, but made big methodological mistakes that led to the wrong conclusion? Or worse, found a source everyone references based on yet other secondary sources, only to look at the original context to discover that everyone's been misquoting it for decades? That happens regularly.

In this case, Ligocki's presentation of the proofs in the blog post is really more rigorous than anything that went on in the Discord server. There's not some golden Truth in there that's being imperfectly mediated; it's just about the attribution. You might have more of a point for results originating from programmatic searches, but that's why the programs are all published outside of Discord, so their output can be replicated.

Sure, but I don't see what that has to do with the choice of publication venue. All of these things happen in traditional peer-review publications too.

> Have you ever seen an original physical copy of, say, Einstein's annus mirabilis papers

I was a grad student at the institute for theoretical physics in Heidelberg. It's famously housed in two old villas with little room for books, so all the walls in almost all rooms are lined with shelfs. In the office I shared with five other students, there was one shelf in it that was locked. The only one in the building. In it was one book from 1905 that had a different color than all the others.

That's the physical copy of the papers you mean. They had issues with theft so they had to have it replaced and then lock it. It probably wasn't even original though.