[0] https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-...
In many fields, preprints have been an established practice for a long time. That allows us to see the alternative to peer review. The main variables that predict how much attention your preprint gets are your name and the topic. With all its imperfections, peer review at least gives a second chance for less known researchers working on less fashionable topics.
That is not a good argument. It points out that research productivity has changed and then tries to correlate this with the rise of peer review, before admitting that the entire argument is confounded and pointless. Then it goes on to the standard non-practitioner approach and cherry-picks examples where peer review didn’t find flaws, which I mean, duh. Of course peer review doesn’t work perfectly to find all errors and fraud, nobody is arguing the point. You could write a similar post demonstrating that fire departments don’t fight fires, or that restaurant health codes aren’t needed to prevent food poisoning.
As a non-academic working in neurotech/sleeptech, we've seen some very questionable studies, and even in discussion with researchers, they've suggested how the study can be designed to get the result you are looking for.
I hope an open system with discussion can improve the state of research and access to research for a larger group.
It's a metric that you need to advance your career. A line on your CV, a reference in your next grant proposal or facility proposal. It shows that people are invested in your work and think it is worthwhile to carry out (regardless of the verifiability of it).
Anyone with an internet connection can write a "paper" and publish it, but that doesn't mean it is useful to the scientific community. Peer review allows the community to filter out quack papers, research which is inherently flawed, or research which has been done before.
This leaves the journals filled with novel research meeting a minimum quality standard, allowing other scientists to build upon them. If you can't get your research published it ostensibly isn't worth anything, so a lot of institutions use the number of papers published and the citations they get as a measurement of a researcher's output. There is nothing wrong with this process.
However, the issue is that journals have been captured by rent-seeking publishers who charge exorbitant fees. This is made even worse because some journals have historically been more strict than others, so getting a paper published in a strict one leads to a higher valuation - and of course the publishers charge higher fees for the more prestigious journals.
Changing this entire model is difficult. Publishing in one of those journals is literally how your worth is valued. Breaking this circle can be done, but it won't be easy.