Very few choose to, and very little discussion actually happens. There is something of a chicken-or-egg problem, but the site is sufficiently established in one community (quantum info) that if folks wanted to discuss papers they could. So I take it as weak evidence that they just don't have the incentives to do so.
If a central discussion forum were anointed as the One True Forum, I weakly predict physicists would spend time defending themselves from "drive-by criticism" (i.e., criticism that is vague and takes little thought, but consumes large resources to defend against) but little constructive would get done.
arxiv is not open. At least not as open as it should be in my opinion. But I fully agree on the chicken-or-egg problem. The main problem is bootsrapping such web service.
I don't think that "anoiting" a forum/web service would be a good strategy. We need to keep open the possibility of a new and better system to take over.
My feeling is that two fundamental requirements must be satisfied. 1. Anybody should be able to submit a paper. 2. Anybody must have an opportunity to become a recognized expert in a field. By anybody I mean that academic or career credentials must not come into play.
Obviously this begs for a rating system on the articles and on the "experts" too. Obviously recognized "experts" should have a bigger weight in the rating than random members. This makes it different from reddit and hacker news. But the idea is similar. Members should also be able to filter papers by rating and be notified only when a paper reaches a desired ranking. This is another difference from hacker news and reddit.
I would be very interested in participating in a project of this kind.
One could start with a model similar to that in which most people using systems which this new system is meant to replace already find themselves.
You should be able to select peers (though, maybe you should be given some as well?) and "experts" to follow. You would only see their activity when you want to, but you could also participate in the larger network. As a practical matter of implementation, I think allowing groups to run segregated networks (ie. their own "node") which can later be joined to each other makes sense for getting actual adoption and for reducing development, infrastructure, and support costs.
I think there are likely many problems with such a crude model, but that is where we find ourselves it seems. Waiting to think up something better might be prudent, but that might be difficult without trying something out.
In addition to collaborative document authoring (which I don't believe LinkedIn provides), data, simulations, and analysis code could be shared and built-on.
https://scirate.com/
Very few choose to, and very little discussion actually happens. There is something of a chicken-or-egg problem, but the site is sufficiently established in one community (quantum info) that if folks wanted to discuss papers they could. So I take it as weak evidence that they just don't have the incentives to do so.
If a central discussion forum were anointed as the One True Forum, I weakly predict physicists would spend time defending themselves from "drive-by criticism" (i.e., criticism that is vague and takes little thought, but consumes large resources to defend against) but little constructive would get done.