There is a cost to doing this though, that's the point. Who gets the money is in many ways not relevant to the central point. You are not paying for a single paper to be reviewed. You're paying for all of the rejected ones too. The high APCs of even non-profit publishers is a key point to show that costs end up being quite high.

> All that activity the journals do prior to publication can probably be streamlined and solved a lot more efficiently

It's a huge industry though, and so saving money can translate to huge profit increases. While not competitive like other marketplaces are, I'm sure these places like money and so have their own drive to cut costs. You can't just throw technology or "social platform" at a problem and hope costs go down.

Well, I feel pretty convinced that in 10 years the world has thrown technology at this problem and that costs has gone down and that the publishing industry is dead; whether or not you say you "can" do so or not.

Although reviewers don't get paid editions don't just organize reviews. They select high impact papers, copy edit papers, typeset and also have some writers for summary stuff at the front of the magazine. Probably more I'm not thinking of. Is it worth it, who knows.

Source: published in Nature and Science.

The context of my comment was specifically that it was said that the one accepted paper had to pay for the cost of all the rejected ones. Is all the things you say (editing, typesetting) done prior to review? It wasn't done on the papers I have reviewed...

Their point isn't really diminished by you claiming easy efficiency gains using "some computer program/social platform".