This.

If you work in the field you know the 10-100 people who provide most expertise and you can build trust relationships with them by delivering interesting thoughts and then get their feedback on These ideas. That's the healthy approach. And if you work hard and the stuff you do is reasonable you will also become known in these circles.

Also technology can help weed out the complete b.s., see HN or Stackoverflow for examples on that.

But this is what peer review is - sending it to the people in my field for their feedback.

It’s just set up formally so you don’t need to ask everyone individually and there is (an attempt at) the feedback being blind so that people who are unpopular don’t get penalised.

That’s literally what peer review is - but set up as a system to make it easier on everyone.

No it's not. Peer review is often done by people have have no clue about what you're doing. And even if they do, not many are motivated to make effort to provide a good review. Source: I received comments from 4 reviewers for my last paper, and not a single one provided any useful feedback (paper's accepted). Two of them simply copy-pasted sentences from the abstract and called it a day.

I've had a similar experience lately and it's frustrating. Literally 1 of 9 reviewers gave meaningful feedback. The rest either had no comment or such vague comments to be useless. Other published papers had comments that just regurgitated the abstract in an effort (I assume) to demonstrate they read the paper. I really wonder if many reviewers just "check the box" so they can say they review for X Journal

> Peer review is often done by people have have no clue about what you're doing.

That's not how I have ever seen peer review done by a reputable conference or journal. Why would they be reviewers if they didn't know the topic?

What do you think the word 'peer' means?

In my field the people I'd ask informally for comment are exactly the same people who would peer review my paper.

The word “peer” means a random name from the references section in my paper, picked by the editors who themselves are very unlikely to be familiar with my area. Out of 50 references, I think only 5-10 are able to review my work.