Comment by steveBK123

I'd agree with the jist of this article. Social media has been less "wisdom of crowds" and more endless algorithmic slop and pay-to-play influencers.

Sure there was always PR dealmaking & money behinds the scenes previously I'm sure, but there were actual magazines/websites/etc in every genre publishing numerical reviews for cars/cameras/games/movies/shows/albums/etc. If you paid attention you could figure out which curators scoring aligned with what you tended to like.

Now every reviewer is a YouTube influencer who loves every product put in front of them, no product is every bad, no scores are assigned because then you can cross compare, etc.

The acquisition, death, resurrection and mundane ongoing existence of dpreview is a good example of this.

What we had before wasn't perfect, but what has followed is worse.