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.
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.
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.
I'm not a scientist, obviously. And, I realize that practical science has as much to do with reputation, fame, and the climbing of academic hierarchies as it does with research. But, it would be so cool to see science more as an evolving, collaborative process.
Imagine you are reading about 5 years of day-in-day-out work by a team of 1500 physicists (eg. CERN, LHC, etc...).
Would you rather read the entire as-it-happened stream of research, going back 7500 person-years - or would you prefer to read a summary, in the form of a paper?
I agree that ideally the stream should be publically available as well, for those that want to consult it - but having regular summaries, written at intervals is very useful.
There's clearly tech waiting to be built here, which might or might not be a startup.
If I'm familiar with the work of the first author then I already have an idea of how much I can trust his/her work. If I don't know this person then I look at the coauthors and especially the PI. If the PI is a heavy hitter in my field then there's my trustability factor right there. If I don't know the PI but I know the laboratory or university it's affiliated with then there's my third line of a trustability metric.
In an ideal world, work from an unknown author would receive the same scrutiny as that from an established lab, and vice versa. Obviously this isn't the case, but the further we drift from it, the more likely we become to see sloppy results wasting everyone's time.
It can't just be about the narrative. That simply isn't science. That's storytelling, and confusing the two has caused a great deal of harm to science in the public eye.
Don't get me wrong though, just because the paper has a heavy hitter as the PI or even as first author, doesn't mean I treat the content with less scrutiny. It's more that I know my time is extremely limited so I'm more willing to spend more time dissecting a paper from an established first author or PI than an unknown person (unknown also meaning that it's not a paper someone recommended to me or a paper someone cited in another work).
It's more like, I'll _make_ time to read papers with certain authors on it because I know that they do good work. I'll also _make_ time to read something if it's published in Nature et al for example. But a random paper from a random author in a random group? It's not that I don't trust this person's work, it's more that I'm unfamiliar with that person's work and there's other things I could spend my time doing as well. I'll download the paper, throw it on my iPad, etc, and I'll get around to it eventually.
I'm convinced that random tourists vote can't have the same weight as recognized experts in the field who know the subject well and whose judgments are appreciated in their form and content. I'm convinced of this because it is the fundamental principle of the referee's review.
http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2014/08/researchgate-faceb...
Actual system is publish or not, but it is possible now to publish everything and use a rating system. This removes the risk of plagiarism and anteriority disputes.