You have no evidence for any of the things that you say. The credit that you are trying to give to Glassdoor is especially artificial. Large scale economic forces, such as the crisis of 2008, have had a much larger effect than Glassdoor. You could try to make the argument "Without Glassdoor, things would be even worse" but so far you have not made that argument. As a counter-point, we should simply acknowledge that unpaid internships used to be illegal, then they became legal, and after 2008 they became common. Likewise, American workers once worked in offices, then in cubicles, and now in open air rooms where they have to wear sound canceling headphones because the noise makes it difficult for anyone to think. Over the last 50 years labor unions died out, and the protections they offered the American workers also died out. And of course, wages stagnated. You can try to make the case that companies treat their workers better, but it will be difficult to suggest that Glassdoor made everything better -- there were some powerful forces making things worse.

As to Yelp, I don't recall the era before Yelp as an era of going to bad restaurants. For informal restaurants, we'd go to wherever friends had been, if the friends said they'd had a good experience. And for fancier restaurants, those were reviewed in the newspapers. Or if you lived in a college town, then every restaurant, even the informal ones, would get a review in the weekly. Like, for instance, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where the Independent would post a review of every restaurant, both the informal and the formal.

I think an honest appraisal of the Internet would have to look hard at its failure to live up to its promise, and why that happened. For most of the 20th Century it was assumed that if knowledge could become universal, then economic growth would increase, and yet the opposite has happened. The years since 2000 have seen below average economic growth and below average productivity growth. Figuring out why economic growth faltered when information was becoming abundant has to be one of the big questions that economics needs to answer.

"economics needs to answer."

Economics is not a science. It's not really possible to apply the scientific method. How we value things has a serious impact too.

Don't get me wrong here. The study of economics is high value and definitely can yield insight we can put to good use, but it's not on par with science in the sense of getting answers.

I would argue the answers we seek lie more along the lines of corruption and how money in politics has empowered large enterprises to shape society to a much larger degree than we can say was generally intended. Surely, carving society into a bunch of what looks like a bunch of fiefdoms impacted growth in a negative way.

Secondly, the lack of effective representation ordinary people see in politics today has not made things better. Corruption has competed very well, pushing the voice of ordinary people, the weight of their concerns, off the table, leaving us all with a poor environment to prosper in.

> People are much more empowered to know the truth: Amazon reviews, restaurant reviews etc. Yes they can be manipulated, and yes counterfeit products can make their way into the supply chain, but we are forgetting that before the internet the lack of scaled reviews meant many more bad meals at restaurants.

I think the problem is worse that you state. For instance, IIRC pretty much all the sites in the "independent" online mattress review industry are either owned by some particular mattress company and shill for them or are pay-for-play. There's a huge amount of astroturfing, even for now-end no name products.

Reddit seems less astroturfed. It's a serious source of reviews.

as long as you hold the correct opinions!

If I'm going there for a mattress review, what "correct opinions" do I have to hold?