I personally prefer the abstract to jumping straight into a full paper, especially since it's quite rich (not one of those two line entries like some arXiv paper abstracts). After reading the abstract I did end up opening the PDF.. but I'm hesitant to pay the PDF tax early. Is this one of those "original source" type decisions?
Yes. I hear you about the downside, but the downside of the more superficial-accessible 'home page' is that people will not read any further, and instead simply respond generically.
The current URL just redirects back to that "superficial-accessible 'home page'" anyway (probably as a substitute for 404 handling, I'd guess); if the intent is to link directly to the paper/PDF, you probably want https://db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2022/cidr2022-p13-crotty.pdf
But I agree with the other person; if people really won't read any further from the homepage, then I highly doubt they'd read any further than the headline and maybe abstract of the original paper anyway, so there ain't really much upside to linking directly to the paper - whereas there's quite a bit of downside for anyone who might feel inclined to watch the video instead (which essentially covers the same information as the paper, just at a higher level / without the same level of detail) or review the benchmark code - neither of which are accessible from the paper.
IMO you guys (as well as whoever did that) are underestimating the difference in how the two different kinds of submission affect resulting discussion. I did offer to change the top URL to point to the video, if they felt that was more important, but never heard back.
How many hours had it been between them making that change and you updating the URL again, though? If linking to just the PDF v. a homepage with the PDF + presentation + code would affect the resulting discussion, it's probably fair to say that the resulting discussion has already been affected (this particular conversation notwithstanding), no?
Even that aside, if the authors care so much about what people see first that they actively set a particular URL to redirect to their preference (EDIT: and have explicitly stated that preference in these comments, assuming "apavlo" is Andy Pavlo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29939332), should that preference not be respected?
