>... simply acknowledging small communities curate the best content

This is true for some things. But for reliability reviews, for example, there's a certain power in large numbers. I'd much rather see reviews for common appliances from 200k people (or more) than the same from a group of 2000 appliance-centric folk. That's true even though the 2k set will likely know and care a lot more than many of the people in the 200k set.

On the other hand, with large numbers of people, it's much harder to deal with "95% of reviews are complaints" problem, which tends not to be so much of a problem with "enthusiasts".