This article seems terribly confused. Of course academic papers are a terrible discussion forum. They're not supposed to be any kind of discussion forum. Acade

This article seems terribly confused. Of course academic papers are a terrible discussion forum. They're not supposed to be any kind of discussion forum. Academic papers are supposed to be contributions to science. They take by definition a long time to publish because they need to go through a peer review process, and they are only interest to a narrow group of people because they typically advance the understanding of a very narrowly defined problem deep within their field. Academics don't just sit in a dusty office communicating with the world through journal articles. We meet in conferences and work in joint projects, have informal discussion forums and correspond through a multitude of different channels. Many academics also have non-academic publications about their research. Academic papers serve a very specific purpose and they do it well. Just because they don't serve some other purpose that you'd like them to serve doesn't make the process broken.