I agree--we definitely opted for a more traditional publication format in this first iteration. We've been thinking of how to fix this and were considering something like HackerNews for publicly-accessible articles (e.g., arXiv). Do you have any other ideas?

I would also consider asking authors at the time of submission to explicitly release articles under a Creative Commons license such as CC-BY or CC0. That would enable a lot of fun creative reuses of the works. However some kind of exception may be required for republished works whose copyright has already been transferred to a third party publisher.

If you look at the actual papers, they're all under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 already.

Why NC? It's overly restrictive and technically prohibits, say, distributing the papers on a website that has advertising revenue.