I think it's interesting to think about the incentives in scientific publication by comparison with the incentives in HN (or Reddit) comment posting.
Someone could spend days of time writing a well researched HN comment that was exceptionally informative and accurate. There are occasionally comments that represent an hour or two of work on them... But multiday-effort comments are non-existent: the incentives of the venue don't reward that effort. And if you do take the time the discussion will have moved on before you get it published. If you published them they would likely be lost in a see of other low effort comments, or if they were acknowledged-- not likely much more than comments that merely took an hour.
You don't just see fewer multiday comments, you see essentially none at all. Nothing technical about HN or Reddit prevents people from writing some epic work of commentary or research in a comment, and there would often be value from such works existing...
The same pattern exists in academic publishing but with the effort levels shifted up one or two orders of magnitude: the maximum moves from an hour to (say) weeks (exact threshold varies by field). Works taking more effort than some field specific cutoff are extremely seldom done. Why make one 10x effort paper when you will serve your interests much better and with lower risks making 10 1x effort papers?
This would be fine if all of science in that field could be done in the window of efforts allowed by those incentives, but that isn't the case... especially since a lot of the low hanging fruit-- results that can be obtained below the cutoff-- is already picked.
So this is part of why you see things like immunologists pointing out that there has been relatively little academic investigation of virus seasonality-- though its an apparent, interesting, and seemingly important phenomena. Studying it in any depth would require experiments spanning years and likely dealing with human subjects on top of the possibility that your ideas don't turn up anything new... a lot of risk for someone who actually needs to get things published.
The extent to which this is an issue depends on the field, though. In my field, you can get massively rewarded, in both soft and hard criteria, if you put effort into writing a good review paper. And many of the giants of the field have sunk even more effort into writing textbooks, which yield even greater rewards. People can do this precisely because the incentives are better than for internet comments; a good textbook can be celebrated for decades.
Someone could spend days of time writing a well researched HN comment that was exceptionally informative and accurate. There are occasionally comments that represent an hour or two of work on them... But multiday-effort comments are non-existent: the incentives of the venue don't reward that effort. And if you do take the time the discussion will have moved on before you get it published. If you published them they would likely be lost in a see of other low effort comments, or if they were acknowledged-- not likely much more than comments that merely took an hour.
You don't just see fewer multiday comments, you see essentially none at all. Nothing technical about HN or Reddit prevents people from writing some epic work of commentary or research in a comment, and there would often be value from such works existing...
The same pattern exists in academic publishing but with the effort levels shifted up one or two orders of magnitude: the maximum moves from an hour to (say) weeks (exact threshold varies by field). Works taking more effort than some field specific cutoff are extremely seldom done. Why make one 10x effort paper when you will serve your interests much better and with lower risks making 10 1x effort papers?
This would be fine if all of science in that field could be done in the window of efforts allowed by those incentives, but that isn't the case... especially since a lot of the low hanging fruit-- results that can be obtained below the cutoff-- is already picked.
So this is part of why you see things like immunologists pointing out that there has been relatively little academic investigation of virus seasonality-- though its an apparent, interesting, and seemingly important phenomena. Studying it in any depth would require experiments spanning years and likely dealing with human subjects on top of the possibility that your ideas don't turn up anything new... a lot of risk for someone who actually needs to get things published.