I've never, personally, had any direct utility from traditional academic peer review for my scientific work.
I've never used that peer review as any kind of signal or credential in judging a paper or deciding whether to read it.
Nearly all the papers I read are preprints.
Reviewing is dead.
I just read some ICLR reviews. Absolutely junk. No insight. Written by humans, but could have been written by a chatbot or teenager who had read a few dozen reviews.
Why do we think this is useful? Only 5% (if that!) of the community has worthwhile opinions.
An #ICLR reviewer shared that they won’t reply to author rebuttals because no reviewers reply to theirs. The cycle of silence continues.
a good review from a smart person is great but nothing hits quite like a bad review from an idiot