alt Hacker News> Is it standard practice for authors to have to defend their submissions via interview like this? If not, why not?
It isn't, but maybe it should be. For post-grad qualifications oral defense is standard, and I didn't mind defending my central thesis then, and won't mind now.
Not in a direct interview style, but most us conferences can request additional information or feedback. If they conditionally accept or reject a paper, that conditional relies on feedback from the author(s).
Interviews like this are interesting, but in no way can scale to the infinite paper slop conferences are facing.