They’ve recently added a seminar function. You upload a paper you want to discuss with others and Academica.edu notifies your mutual followers, that is people whose work you follow and who also follow your work. You can also tweet word of the seminar, facebook it, and otherwise get the word out, which is what I’m doing here. You then have 20 days to discuss the paper.
The paper displays on the left of the screen and comments display on the right. Some comments, annotations, are tied to specific points in the text:
That’s a shot from a seminar I’ve convened around an open letter I posted to Steven Pinker some years ago. It’s about the nature of stories, using the Winnebago Trickster cycle as an example, and also includes a capsule history of academic literary criticism from just after WWII to more or less the present. Pinker made a short reply.
You can join the seminar here:
https://www.academia.edu/s/1a44a72101