[Mezzie]

Superficially yes, but in actuality it would be very different due to the context surrounding academic papers vs. Reddit.

Organizationally speaking, Reddit is a dumpster fire; check out the 'search' function (I'm just speaking on a taxonomical/categorization perspective, I can't speak to their dev practices).

Academic papers aren't. (They're a dumpster fire in their own ways: The replication crisis and the lack of publishing negative results comes to mind, but damn if they aren't all organized!)

There's two key differences:

1.) Academic papers have other supporting metadata that could combine with the more in-depth citation information to offer clear improvements to the discovery process. Imagine being able to click on a MeSH term and then see, in order, what every paper published on that topic in the past year recommends you read. I also think improving citation information would do a lot to make research more accessible for students.

2.) Reddit's system lets anybody with an account upvote or downvote. Given you don't even need an email address to make a Reddit account, there's functionally zero quality control for expressing an opinion. For academic publications, there is a quality control process (albeit an imperfect one). If only 5 people in the world understand a given topic, it's really helpful to be able to see THEIR votes: If they all 'downvote' a paper that would suggest it's wrong.