Fundamentally, there aren't too many people who can meaningfully comment on most papers. The alternative to commenting before reading the paper is almost certainly reading the paper and then not commenting because you don't really have much to add. So let's assume some people do start reading the articles? Well, they're just going to say less. There's a thousand ways to have an easy and wrong take on a paper. If you want good reasoned discussion about papers you're better off looking elsewhere - for example, The Weeds podcast from Vox, where they actually take a white paper, read it, think about it and discuss its implications. You can disagree with them and talk about how effective they are at engaging with the topic (or as is often the case you can get irrationally angry because you don't like their politics), but fundamentally it's a much better venue for having that sort of nuanced and informed discussion than 140 characters at a time mixed in with the sewer that is twitter.
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#231Whilst I sympathize with why this person is ranting, I find it kind of funny. People act the way they do on social media due to a mix of the design of social media, and human nature. It's not complete chance that twitter has an entire underclass of people who just yell vitriol at the blue checkmark brigade. It's not chance that reddit divides itself into lots of echo-chambers that are essentially repeating the same handful of opinions in various different colours (in reddit's defence this can be avoided using extremely hands-on moderation).