Superficially yes, but in actuality it would be very different due to the context surrounding academic papers vs. Reddit. Organizationally speaking, Reddit is

Superficially yes, but in actuality it would be very different due to the context surrounding academic papers vs. Reddit. Organizationally speaking, Reddit is a dumpster fire; check out the 'search' function (I'm just speaking on a taxonomical/categorization perspective, I can't speak to their dev practices). Academic papers aren't. (They're a dumpster fire in their own ways: The replication crisis and the lack of publishing negative results comes to mind, but damn if they aren't all organized!) There's two key differences: 1.) Academic papers have other supporting metadata that could combine with the more in-depth citation information to offer clear improvements to the discovery process. Imagine being able to click on a MeSH term and then see, in order, what every paper published on that topic in the past year recommends you read. I also think improving citation information would do a lot to make research more accessible for students. 2.) Reddit's system lets anybody with an account upvote or downvote. Given you don't even need an email address to make a Reddit account, there's functionally zero quality control for expressing an opinion. For academic publications, there is a quality control process (albeit an imperfect one). If only 5 people in the world understand a given topic, it's really helpful to be able to see THEIR votes: If they all 'downvote' a paper that would suggest it's wrong.