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@Velocio
The internet gives us several new abilities compared to, say, 25 years ago or 25 years prior to that.
It delivers globalisation to the consumer, rather than just being the domain of large companies and governments.
You now have the ability to find information on, and purchase, the entire output of the world. You can find details on some component hand-crafted in a garage in the USA, and have it delivered to you within a couple of weeks if you have the cash for it.
This breaks everything. In the past whole retail models were based on the exclusivity of a market by both being somewhere that your competitors were not, and having rights to distribute something that your competitors did not. A lot of the money is traditionally made in controlling availability of items and dictating prices.
Anyhow, with an ever greater catalogue of items available, we the consumers have a problem: How to navigate this product space in order to find the items we want.
We never used to have this problem, the only option open to us was to visit the local shop and choose from the selection that they had curated for us.
How many people here now make the majority of their purchases solely in their local shop, without researching online, and considering items outside of the range supplied by the local store?
Information overload has happened in many spaces because of the internet. And it's happening in retail too. On items that are not perishable and who value exceeds the cost of delivery, it makes sense to consider the catalogue of available items as being whatever the whole world offers.
The big problem is now choosing. Our local shop might have offered 3 comparable items, now we have tens and hundreds (if not thousands) of comparable items to choose from.
With that comes a complexity problem. What differentiates these items? Sure there are purely quantifiable differences (weight, dimensions, materials), but then there are also qualitative differences (aesthetics) and also personal preferences (vegan, boycott Israel, nationalism - US vs China is being played out in the US).
These factors transcend the capability of manufacturer catalogues to communicate the differences. So as consumers, we've effectively grouped ourselves into these interest groups where we hope that the hive mind of knowledge will help us perform the navigation of the retail space.
This works... to a point. But it certainly beats many of the prior methods of reducing complexity in purchasing decisions.
The point to which is breaks down is partly highlighted in the OP. It's selection bias as a result of the peer group.
Just how many customers did Brick Lane Bikes lose because of the angle grinder incident? Quite a few I'd warrant. How many sales has LFGSS cost Create because of the thread on here? Again, I'd bet it was quite a few.
With great power comes great responsibility.
We should realise that on one hand we the consumers are starting to control our own possibilities... we're shaping the products being produced by purchasing the products we want from the global catalogue and by influencing sales that other people have towards the products we collectively believe are good value. Whilst influencing the practises that the larger companies have thanks to greater information (look at Apple + Foxconn), and at the same time supporting and maintaining the skilled craft end of industry (Demon Cycles is a good example here).
On the other hand, we have the ability to actually hurt a company through our collective behaviour. I'm not say that's a good or bad thing, it may be that the company sold the wrong things for this day and age, or provided consistently poor service... but it's not specious to highlight a correlation between collectivised consumer behaviour and the success or failure of a company.
Anyhow... I think it's all good, but I truly believe the tools we use to share this information and to work together are currently limited. I also think that at no point do we dumb things down... no-one skips research just because they read things online, they just have a shortcut to the answer and know what some of the main decision indicators should be when considering a product.
Yeah, anyway... this internet shit is the bomb.