> If you read something in a major publication, you can trust it more than if it was just posted to a website.
I'm not sure that is true, I've studied a fair bit of statistics and I can usually find flaws in most social science studies I read. So I trust an article combined with a few hundred HN comments a lot more than I trust anything published in scientific journals without comments, since usually if something is wrong someone in the comment section will find it. Even on reddit if you wade through it you can usually find some nitpickers adding good discussion on articles with a few hundred comments.
There is still a much lower acceptance rate at a good journal than a bad journal that might accept anything and everything that is to the page limit. You might still get a faulty paper of course, but large journals have the benefit of choosing.
I'm not sure that is true, I've studied a fair bit of statistics and I can usually find flaws in most social science studies I read. So I trust an article combined with a few hundred HN comments a lot more than I trust anything published in scientific journals without comments, since usually if something is wrong someone in the comment section will find it. Even on reddit if you wade through it you can usually find some nitpickers adding good discussion on articles with a few hundred comments.