Why do most papers in CS conferences say "novel" repeatedly now a days?

I find this extremely irritating.

It is up to me, as the reader, to judge whether this is novel or not.

Please tell me what you have done, rather than telling me that (you think) it is novel.

Don't tell me that your results are important, or surprising, or anything like that. I will judge the importance or surprise or novelty.

It is not like if you didn't tell me it is important (if indeed it is) I wouldn't notice.

And if it is not novel, why would you be submitting it to the conference, anyway?

"The sample of DOIs included in the study was made up of a random selection of up to 1,000 registered to each member organization. Twenty-eight percent of these works — more than two million articles — did not appear in a major digital archive, despite having an active DOI. Only 58% of the DOIs referenced works that had been stored in at least one archive. The other 14% were excluded from the study because they were published too recently, were not journal articles or did not have an identifiable source."
(Photo: Anna Berkut/Alamy).

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00616-5

USENIX is in financial distress, judging from their 2023 report https://www.usenix.org/blog/2023-usenix-annual-meeting-report

As a distributed systems practitioner, I probably read more papers from USENIX affiliated conferences (NSDI/OSDI/ATC/FAST...) than any other org. It's a shame that it comes to this.

Fellow engineers—maybe show them a little support if you regularly read their open-access papers? Membership starts at $60/yr—pretty reasonable on an engineer salary scale.

Disclaimer: USENIX didn't contact me for this post.

How bad are citations as a metric? The world is already upside down. Clarivate can no longer produce a list of highly cited mathematicians. Obscure Chinese medical schools (without a maths department) are more cited than Princeton.

https://www.science.org/content/article/citation-cartels-help-some-mathematicians-and-their-universities-climb-rankings

"Highly cited researcher" is on the cusp of becoming an insult in every field.

We should really drive a stake through the heart of bibliometry once and for all.