great comment, mlinsey. i've been thinking about this problem a bit too and your points essentially sum up what needs to be built - a HN for academia. citeseerx, though more of a search engine, kind of does this on an annual basis by tabulating citations; ditto for ssrn.com in the social sciences world. but i think one of the problems is that the conversations and feedback around these papers doesn't yet happen in a more public forum, and that alone would be a pretty useful feature.

btw, i don't think your email address is public, but my contact info should be listed; feel free to shoot me a message.