Hypothes.is: Taking peer review to the Internet (opens in new tab)

Well, there's http://arxiv.org .

And of course, anyone can put anything they want on the internet, which is a form of publishing into the public domain. If you mean, publish in such a way as to get read and become part of the academic literature, that's another story.

I've had this same thought many times.

Their response to this concern on the FAQ at Kickstarter is as follows:

"No one has yet made an effective attempt to leverage the strengths of the Internet to improve the quality of information we consume, at the place that we consume it. In essence, we are bringing crowd-sourced peer-review to the event horizon where information is produced—the thousands of news sites and blogs on the Internet. To encourage quality, we will employ a reputation framework.

We’ve closely researched over 20 current and previous online projects such as ReframeIt, SpinSpotter, ThirdVoice, Stickis, Fleck, ShiftSpace, WebClipper, zBubbles, and others – as well as offline efforts such as FAIR and Media Matters. All have key conceptual flaws which ultimately are or were fatal limitations on their effectiveness and scalability. Hypothes.is is a direct result of our conclusion that previous efforts have missed the essential ingredients of success, and has been designed to address each of them."

That's only true under the assumption that popularity is the only factor in visibility. On hacker news that's not even true entirely because there's a temporal factor: new postings remain visible for at least a short time. However, there may exist other possible ways to artificially increase visibility in order to promote diversity. Some of these methods are the research subject of Paul Resnick at the University of Michigan who is listed as an advisor.

My understanding is that attempts will be made to algorithmically promote diversity and to reward/punish social behaviors in such as way as to discourage discursive protectionism.