We publish here, and the stuff that is good rises to the top with upvotes from our peers, and it is all subject to review in the comments where many an interesting discussion is had.
We all gain by sharing ideas as widely as possible. We just need a way for that to happen.
An academic article is not a blog post. Also, only the most popular posts get discussed here -- tons of stuff is lost if it's not initially popular. Timing your submission allows for gaming the system.
All scholarly articles need to go through peer review and receive honest, constructive feedback -- especially the bad ones, and Hacker News (and Reddit and Slashdot and any system like that which doesn't assign reviewers to articles) isn't very good at that.
Which is also a system that can be gamed, by the way. For example, by the reviewers:
- "Oh dammit, we got scooped... better use the insights from here to help us past our hurdles, while stating this work is not original enough to be published so we can quickly submit our own and get published earlier after all!"
- "I see that this paper belongs to Camp A with regards to these two competing hypotheses explaining unexplained phenomenon X, I am in Camp B. Therefore, I will consider this paper rubbish by definition."
- "I am an old researcher who does not believe in some of the newer findings that contradict longstanding assumptions that I "grew up with", and therefore will never allow this paper to pass."
- "I am a very insulated researcher who cannot make sense of this multidisciplinary work, therefore reject the parts that lie outside of my field as rubbish."
- "This paper is a by a researcher competing for the same position/grant/etc. as me. Better make sure they don't get too much credit."
- "I'm not sexist/racist/etc but... totally clearly biased in my judgement of this paper because..."
Now, I'm obviously describing worst-case scenarios here. But my point is: it's human politics all the way down.
My argument is that a blog aggregator style system is a bad fit which doesn't meet the requirements we desire from a replacement of the current commercial publishing scheme.
If you tried to use them for things that people care more intensely about, like determining what gets to be part of The Academic Literature, then they would instantly become the subject of concerted efforts at manipulation. Even now, HN has to deal with voting rings and the like; it would be much, much worse if people's careers were riding on it.
It's Goodhart's law: as soon as a measure becomes a _target_ it rapidly stops being a good measure.