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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Dunno about paying. Remember Amazon Turk? Folks just spammed it with zero-effort submissions and 'closed' thousands of contracts with bots. Instantly gamed, so some jerk could walk off with thousands, $1 at a time.

The shaming idea, that could work.

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My understanding of the payment strategy is that it would be targeted at people who already qualify as experts but are on the fence. For example, I know postdocs and young faculty who would like to review more as a kind of community service but can't quite justify it in the face of other demands on their time. The money might be enough to tip the scales.

I don't think it will work on the other more senior pool of expert reviewers. On the other hand, I think most of the really bad reviews come from this senior pool, so maybe that's fine.

Mechanical Turk is still useful, though. And there’s a big difference between paying a bored rando $1 to identify pictures of frogs and asking an academic who is highly invested in the relevant ideas to review a (hopefully interesting) paper.

But is it different in the, nobody-will-scam-it way? Remember, we're talking starving academics. They don't have a great history of philanthropic behavior.

Amazon Turk is still around, and if it had that problem they fixed it pretty quick. The poster reviews the submission before you get paid, and the same system would be in place in this scenario.

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