Reddit, Google+, LinkedIn as Science Peer Review Systems

The position you take on the rubber stamping part of peer review is simply not serious at best in many areas of science and engineering. Ask anybody around you that has published in good journals or conferences. Hence I did not address this statement because it simply is not true. Try sending papers to ICML, Siggraph, SODA, Nature, etc, I doubt the peer reviews are performing any sorts of rubber stamping.

But once they have gone through that process and they are published it is simply very difficult to root out bad work given new data.

You might be aware of post publication peer review, yet, this model is not in use except through accidental replication exercises that sometimes uncover problems that eventually yield corrigendae or retraction. Currently it is very adhoc.

If you understand how science work beyond press releases, you'll know that the fraud and abuses will always be in the system. Post publication peer review is the only way to rooting out bad work that has been published or is in the preprint stage (I consder that if your preprint is out on arxiv or some other medium, it is in effect published).

Right now, for published papers, it is left as an exercise for journals to acknowledge they let some dubious work through. There is simply no economic incentive for a speedy process. If you read retractionwath.com often you'll notice that the current system is simply not regulating itself.

Open post publication peer review is a way to perform that function. Looking back it is formalizing the process by which people used to trust or not older work. It is also blurring the lines between preprints and published work since they are now under the same scrutiny.

I agree it is also less convenient for the press or the science press to be comfortable with this situation (post publication peer review) but Science becomes robust when it is clearly capable of rooting out bad work through processes like this one.