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.

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.

Well, some blog posts are worth citing.

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.