I think SO is the wrong model and that Hacker News is a better one. There's already reputation/badges/etc for the sort of academic tasks you're describing: loo

I think SO is the wrong model and that Hacker News is a better one. There's already reputation/badges/etc for the sort of academic tasks you're describing: look at any CV (eg: conference presentations, referee assignments, etc, and the obvious one is journal publications). So I don't see how replacing the old system with the old system plus usernames is an obvious improvement or a necessary evolution. I'm way more interested in informal discussion of interesting papers and news than anything else. As everyone else has mentioned, the big issue is getting a large community. So what would be really cool would be to figure out how to do something like HN or SO without active involvement by a large community. In my field there's a lot of discussion/review/etc of working papers and published results, but it's all scattered across different blogs and commenting systems. Plus papers build on each other and some are clear replies to other research. If you could take that sort of dispersed discussion and put it into an HN or reddit style threaded view that was available at one spot (or an SO style question and answer format, if you prefer), that would be awesome. edit: typo