The point isn't that, I think. It's that valuable reviews are easily downed out by YouTube-comment-quality reviews. Schemes like curation of reviews by up-/downvoting don't work for most papers, as they are of interest to only a relatively small number of people engaged in that particular niche of scientific inquiry (which, by the way, is kind of the nature of things as a field specializes more and more). The concern is that there wouldn't be enough "genuine" people to counteract the noise.

I'd wager that the whole concept has staled. In 1800, when you could have the smartest polymaths in the world look at your paper, that stamp of approval meant something.

I never looked at the peer review process in that way ("stamp of approval"). For a journal article, as long as it's not a desk-rejection (because the study is not in scope of the journal or such), it's usually an iterative process involving the authors, the reviewers, and the editor, which results in an often greatly improved article. A key person in that process is often the editor, rather than the reviewers (if they do their job well).

Peer review as such does not provide much of a signal as to how important a paper is or a binary "good paper"/"bad paper" decision; ideally, it's a process that helps maintain a certain standard. Conference proceedings typically don't use this process, but (more or less) ask for a simple yes/no (or a 1-5 rating where everyone knows that it's going to be rejected if you don't give a high enough rating because of a 30% acceptance rate etc.).

You are aware that half of these certified internet geniuses are trolls and crackpots who try to prove why Special Relativity Theory is wrong or promote their own free energy devices, though, right? RIGHT?

Or is this the first day you're on the internet?

it is not whether it can hold up against an onslaught of cranks, trolls, and well meaning idiots, but whether a researcher should be expected to have to defend their hard work against them in order to get published. Bullshit can always be cranked put faster than you could ever address. Or do you think that everytime an astronomer tries to publish a paper she should have to address the very serious concerns of flat-earthrs and young-earth creationists???

Parent said "that's just what I need", not "that's just what my work needs". It's not about "your work" being able to hold up, it's about you.

I guess so. I was imagining what a massive waste of time and energy it will be to just read the comments much less respond to them. It's already bad enough when you have people in your field who refuse to understand your work no matter how you re-word your explanation (yeah, going through this right now), but when you have people like the Wikipedia editors or reddit commenters who have all the time and energy in the world and no understanding of your field, you can imagine how much of a disaster it will be.

Reminds me of a time when this person in my field decided to move its most popular wiki to Wikipedia and delete the wiki site. Well it resulted in the wiki site being gone, and a bunch of scattered Wikipedia pages with no content because it was way too much trouble to get the Wikipedia editors to change the content so that it will be actually informative.