&gt;To make a proper comment on a paper requires a significant amount of work (as does refereeing).<p>Let&#x27;s not fool ourselves, not all refereed papers are great, not all of them are significant and not all of them are published in high impact journals. Most of the reviewing is cursory, menial, and often delegated to postdocs&#x2F;phds. Most scientific topics are highly specialized, and you &#x27;re unlikely to see trolls bothering to comment on them. Writing another paper as response is not a solution either: the pace of article publishing is months and years, not seconds.<p>An example: I have often found the discussion of scientific papers here, in HN, to be illuminating, clarifying or countering issues, and offering a wider perspective that is often not mentioned in the article itself. And it&#x27;s not like everyone in HN is a luminary, just mostly inquisitive people. I also see articles discussed in a useful way in twitter. Why can&#x27;t we open up this discussion?<p>I don&#x27;t think comments are to be taken as reputation metrics either. But i do think a simple, helpful open discussion section is missing from every paper that i have read. I believe the main barrier to it is that academics do not want to get off their high horse of untouchability.<p>To be precise, many journals do have a comment section, but nobody uses it.