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Comment by downWidOutaFite | Hacker News Reader

My dream would be arxiv hosting a reddit-style upvote/downvote discussion thread for every paper. I've seen this work beautifully on some science subreddits, as well as on Scot Aaranson and Terence Tao's blogs. It can really help flesh out problems/questions, generate intelligent discussion, and even lead to cooperation between participants on further research. One requirement for it to work is strong moderation to keep the discussion focused.

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Scirate [1] is an arxiv overlay with upvotes (called scites) and a comment section. The scite function does quite help a lot with bubbling up the better papers to the top. But I have never seen any serious discussion in the comments section - only clarifying questions, or missed citations.

[1] https://scirate.com/arxiv/quant-ph (go to previous day to see more scites)

ArXiv has deliberately left the implementation of such systems to others. There's nothing stopping anyone from making such an overlay, should they choose to do so (and many have tried).

The problem that you get then is fragmentation. Everybody will be on a different service, and the discussions don't get off the ground.

Prestigious journals, assuming reasonable editors, can spontaneously emerge and attract submissions. Authors publish in journals based upon some combination of 1) editorial quality, 2) whether or not everyone else in their field publishes in it, and 3) prestige.

2 and 3 are self-reinforcing effects -- why does Nature attract prestigious papers? Because it publishes prestigious papers. Why does Nature attract high-quality research? Because it is full of high-quality research.

All of this is to say that it is likely that, given a distribution of reasonably-edited arXiv-overlay journals, there's a pretty good chance that just a few of them in any given field (or at large) will attract most of the serious work

Sounds like a job for a dedicated Lemmy/kbin instance

Maybe, but you really want all the discussion easily discoverable and in a central authoritative place to encourage experts in the field to find and join the conversation.

Isn't that implied by "dedicated instance" regardless of "lemmy"?

I’m just saying that Lemmy or kbin software gives you the tools to build just that quite easily

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