Reviews in any medium are entertainment whether it’s film, music, games, hardware, food. Ultimately it’s someone’s subjective opinion on something. If you actually want to be happy with your choices your best bet is to find a reviewer with the same tastes and preferences as you and follow their train of thought. If you hate horror movies, you’re not going to enjoy “bring her back” no matter what the critics say.

and thats why "influencers" are big

Easy way to outsource your thinking. Next step in this epopee will be/is already GenAI.

You can’t do all of your “thinking” yourself. You’re not a lone, isolated subsistence farmer. People have been reviewing things for other people for centuries, and it’s been a valuable service.

You are not wrong, but one thing is thinking about what others said and thought previously, generating maybe new ideas, or maybe not, but at least making them yours. Just parroting or blindly believe what others says, it's a tad different.

I can't relate to their behaviour, so even if they had the same taste i would not want to be associated.

you might not have found the ones that like the same stuff has you just yet

You know, thats true.. I wonder how much pain one has to endure before finding the right one.

Most of the time, I don't think it's subjective, I just think the reviewer has a conflict of interest. Especially pre-release products.

I think if a layman picks a niche, and really goes into it, then the layman has a fair chance beating the professional in that specific niche. So, you are not wrong with this feeling at all. What professionals have in their favor is a higher level overview of the subject, and experience with similar subjects. Usually this means that while they might not know a niche in an out by heart, they can discover it very quickly, or consider things that are not fitting into that specific niche.

Also, these journalists might not be professionals at all.

That is also true in medicine, as a side note. If you have a specific combination of conditions, or a rare condition, you will know more about it than doctors. The good ones know this and accept it. The bad ones are offended you know more than they do in this area – or simply go into denial.

In the end, each body is a niche, which each one is uniquely positioned to know better than anyone else. But it’s hard to accept, for medical personal sometimes, and often for the patients themselves. They tend to want the doctor to be the all-knowing god.

Yes, medicine was specifically what I was thinking about! And it's a touchy subject, just as you mention. A patient, a layman, isn't supposed to know more than the doctor. It's a delicate situation.

Take all human knowledge as a whole pie. Out of that is, the experts only know 1/100 of a slice. We maybe experts in some minute context, yet there are so many that know so much more when removed from that context.

Or rephrased, that Person who has to deal with something 80 percent of their life knows more than the person having to deal with it 20 percent of their life.

I mean, yes? That has been true for as long as I can remember

It seems like they do use other devices, but the reviews never make sense, or they focus on the spec sheet too much. Since like 2009, the most talked about smartphone in those tech magazines was always some random thing like an HTC Plus+ Maxx 25.