Scholarly Conversations
People who have an interest in learning are not confined to have to pay thousands of dollars a year to access scholarly journals and similar subscription-based articles. Instead, they can turn to websites such as reddit even that have a conversation based side to them that actually stimulate and try to initiate scholarly conversation.
The Scientists in this particular reddit article are generating information by asking questions, and then combing through them to “judge which have done the most to benefit humanity, answer long-standing questions, or pave the way for fruitful new research.” The people who actually are judging these questions have definite merit, as they say they are from Science magazine, from the Board of Review editors, or just other scientists. Since reddit is an open-sourced dialogue, anyone can really contribute so there are not really any barriers to get one’s thoughts to the reviewers, however, as mentioned earlier, the judging process is three-fold and the suggestions would have to meet that certain criteria in order to make the cut. The only critique I could really think of is based on reddit as a site, rather than this particular forum. People use reddit, but without knowing that this sort of forum exists (through advertising and other mediums), it will be hard to garner enough to participate that do not regularly visit this part of the reddit site. Instead, this conversation needs to broadcast elsewhere as a means of getting a larger sample size than just typical reddit users.
