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Amazon reviews are still useful because many times, people will point out some negative aspects and nonobvious defects of the product that I didn't think of. This helps me avoid buying a lot of junk. (My previous mattress shopping example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24197305)
Yes, reviews can be gamed but there's still some signal in the noise.
On the other hand, many product categories on Amazon have useless reviews because they group unrelated SKUs together into 1 page. E.g. different harddrive models of different capacities made across different years and manufactured in different countries of origin. E.g. everybody writing 1-star reviews of the bad Seagate 3TB drives is irrelevant to assessing the other 10TB and 16TB drives. E.g. 24000+ combined reviews for unrelated harddrives released across 15+ years : https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-IronWolf-12TB-Internal-Drive/...
It also makes sense that reviews would have signal. It's not like people are dumb, they were just born in an earlier world where reviews would actually have some reputation attached to them. Movies, restaurants, concerts, that kind of stuff would be reviewed by someone capable of writing and filtered through a newspaper editor.
Now things have changed and it takes some time for everyone to figure it out.
Like it makes sense that shaving makes your beard grow, it just turns out not be what actually happens.
So I think it's plausible we'll tend to have a somewhat better awareness of the dynamics around reviews that are posted online.
(But I don't think we're more savvy about the world in general. If anything, we tend to have STEM-like narrower exposure to the world than many, coupled with the overconfidence that comes from income level.)
Grandma: “They aren’t allowed to lie on the news so that has to be true.”
That's the problem with Boomers and earlier generations. They grew up (in the US) with first the Mayflower and then the Fairness Doctrine that forced at least some basic ethics standards, and with a media portfolio that didn't consist of a few very rich people and companies controlling wide swaths of media (Fox, Sinclair, Murdoch come to my mind), leading to actual competition between media, high quality journalism and actually well paid journalists.
They didn't realize that the landscape has changed - there are no media standards anymore, there is no antitrust enforcement anymore, hell Carlson got away with his antics because a court ruled that a "reasonable viewer" would be skeptic towards his claims [1] despite it being more than obvious that Carlson's audience eat up everything he spouts as pure truth.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-...
The internet accelerated the decline by 1) destroying media business models, leading to seasoned editors and fact checkers being replaced by cheaper twenty-something Twitter addicts, and 2) driving consumers into filter bubbles and feeding their confirmation bias.
Even NPR are deteriorating. For example, this aged extremely poorly: https://twitter.com/NPRpubliceditor/status/13192811012239400...
It did not. Even a Republican-led investigation didn't find any wrongdoing [1]. Not every bullshit conspiracy claim of the far right warrants an investigation - their entire modus operandi is running a continuous "firehose of falsehood" stream [2], and media reporting on each and every of their claims like a bunch of flies swarming around a pile of poo is actually dangerous to society.
When the far right manages to create absurd amount of media attention for nothing substantial every time they open their mouths, then there's no airtime left to report on stuff that actually matters.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/10/us/politics/hunter-biden-...
Talk radio, prove to be a great venue for conservative speech. Countless efforts were made to silence them in the name of “fairness” as defined by government bureaucrats.
Or maybe "conservative voices" have used lies and hatred as a political tool for decades? We've seen just how incredibly the media landscape has devolved since the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. Far-right talking points everywhere.
Name one, just one case of "progressive voices" doing the same that comes even close to what the right wing does with people like Tucker Carlson every single day.