"however sometimes that can take a long time to find the quality." As a non-academic but with some insight there - this matches with most research, I think. Up

"however sometimes that can take a long time to find the quality." As a non-academic but with some insight there - this matches with most research, I think. Upvoting at a heat of the moment is kinda worthless as it comes to rating academic output. You need quite a lot of time to draw valid conclusions about a paper. If everyone voted for every paper this would mean that a huge chunk of the competent population would spend an inordinate amount of time on a single paper. That's why it's far more efficient that only a few people of more-or-less guaranteed competence spend considerable effort in reviewing results. One high-quality vote is much better than thousand low-quality ones. This efficiency mechanism and validating the qualifications of the reviewers is the only added-value the established publication systems brings in to the table as discoverability has become cheap commodity.