Now the question becomes: who is the most authoritative on topic X?
I think that was Google's project. I think now it's: who is the most authoritative on topic X in a way that's personally relevant to me, even if I have never heard of that person before?
I sort of agree with you on professional reviewers, but I sort of don't. The dilemma of a professional reviewer is that as soon as you're a professional reviewer, you're not really a normal consumer anymore and your experience of a product is going to be very different. (For example, a common complaint about the Android eco-system from reviewers is that it's annoying for each manufacturer's user interface to be slightly different. But a normal consumer who buys a phone and uses it for the length of a contract really doesn't care about this so much as the quality of the skin itself.)
So, basically: I think professional and amateur reviews both have value.
More on topic, though: while I don't really subscribe to the "filter bubble" theory (I still think the digital medium exposes people to way more different perspectives and arguments than pre-digital), I do kind of wonder about the turtles-all-the-way-down aspect of all of this algorithmic ranking. I think it's a subtly different problem.
I think that was Google's project. I think now it's: who is the most authoritative on topic X in a way that's personally relevant to me, even if I have never heard of that person before?
I sort of agree with you on professional reviewers, but I sort of don't. The dilemma of a professional reviewer is that as soon as you're a professional reviewer, you're not really a normal consumer anymore and your experience of a product is going to be very different. (For example, a common complaint about the Android eco-system from reviewers is that it's annoying for each manufacturer's user interface to be slightly different. But a normal consumer who buys a phone and uses it for the length of a contract really doesn't care about this so much as the quality of the skin itself.)
So, basically: I think professional and amateur reviews both have value.
More on topic, though: while I don't really subscribe to the "filter bubble" theory (I still think the digital medium exposes people to way more different perspectives and arguments than pre-digital), I do kind of wonder about the turtles-all-the-way-down aspect of all of this algorithmic ranking. I think it's a subtly different problem.