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Desk rejects are typical in Bio, and increasingly common in Comp Bio IMO, despite the obvious benefit of accelerating slop processing, they are a net negative as: 1) they greatly reward established players; 2) they narrow the scope of work being published to "trendy" topics. I hope CS can keep away

Hard disagree. Theory venues are already super conservative. This time STOC is even single blind. They’ll just desk reject anything that isn’t super standard or authored by big name authors. I am sorry but I don’t trust STOC reviewers with desk rejections.

One paper was complete gibberish. One was readable, like parseable English, but said nothing at all (reviews have started coming in and seem to agree). One was incorrect format and so unclear if it was within the length requirement. And one was missing required sections.

All my reviews for ICLR declared LLM generation, which was within the rules. However the theory paper was just theory, no validation - and while superficially it looked fine, it was impossible to validate properly without a huge time investment, an investment that the authors seemingly skipped.

Computer security has moved to this model, but IMO for frivolous instead of useful reasons. Ie instead of desk-rejecting slopful papers, they are rejecting papers which have, eg, minor formatting issues, or which dont have valid orcids…

It does sting to get a desk rejection after one week. What else does? Waiting 4+ months for the same rejection, with a 2-line review (or, worse, an entirely AI-generated one). If you're not going to engage with the paper, make it quick.