> I said reddit-like, not reddit-clone.Yes, and that's what I understood you to mean and a reddit-like voting system for papers is what I was talking about. (I even wrote "reddit-like voting system" as my last sentence in the post you replied to.)
>You're wrong. Firstly, it's often impossible to judge the significance of a result even soon after publishing.
I'm not talking about "significance" in relation to the whole of human history. I mean "significance" in the sense of a threshold for requesting other people to invest their time & effort to study the paper and also the subsequent subscribers to read.
>, reviewers already donate their time to review papers, so the human effort is already there.
Yes, but the key you're missing is that they donate their time because a respectable _somebody_ requested them to do so. The triggers for motivating that donated effort matters.
If I'm a working scientist working 50 hours a week, I'm not logging into a reddit-like voting system and investing hours to read (mostly bad) papers that have 0 votes so I can submit my 1 vote. No, somebody I respect (e.g. a journal editor) needs to ping me and say, "hey, this paper looks interesting, can you review it?" After I peer review it, I may get some quid-pro-quo such as free access to the journal's other papers and/or when it's my turn to submit a paper, the editor will consider forwarding it. So yes, I'm not "paid in cash" but I'm paid "in kind" with some intangibles.
That social dynamic is not replicable in a reddit-like voting system.
Therefore your following scenario of:
>whereby some random selection of scientists obtain access to early drafts
... is not realistic because scientists do not want to be part of random pool to be assigned random papers. That's contrary to basic human nature! Scientists want papers referred to them by another human and not an algorithm. It's not a technology problem, it's a human problem.
All the software suggestions to solve this from programmers including ideas such as a reddit-like system, or a github-like system, or a blockchain type system, etc ... they all misunderstand the culture and psychological motivations of publishing.
>What is scientific consensus if not a vote among some random sampling of scientists studying a field.
Yes, I can see that if you reduce the problem to the simple abstraction of "votes", it seems like building a software platform to formally capture votes is The Solution.
What your simplification leaves out is all the human signaling required before people render their votes. That's the human dynamic that collaboration software doesn't solve.
(In any case, an accepted published paper isn't "consensus" per se; it's just another piece of evidence for people to weigh. The paper just passed through enough human curation filters that may be worthwhile to read.)