My guess is that they're trying to deal with a problem they're creating: being open to everyone. The problem with places like Twitter, Reddit, Github, HN, etc is that you don't know you're talking to a peer and the idiots asking irrelevant questions or proposing dumb things outnumber researchers a million to one. Even allowing public to upvote or affect the rankings is not beneficial to science.

I'm all for casting wide nets and making things available to everyone, but a little gate keeping is not bad (just don't gate keep by race, class, or those things). But I'm sorry, research is hard. There's a reason people spend decades researching things that at face value look trivial. Rabbit holes are everywhere and just because you don't know about them doesn't mean your opinion has equal weight.

We seriously lack areas where experts can talk to other experts.