A bit of both, I think, they feed into each other.
Google being useless for something like product reviews means that any smaller sites that are any good are not getting the traffic they deserve, because they're being outcompeted by the ads and the fake review sites.
People still need the content, though. But how do you find that review without a search engine? You have to resort to that even though Google sucks for the general web, it's still very much useful if you restrict it to something very particular. You have to know where to start though, so you have to resort to one of the 4-5 huge sites like Reddit or Hacker News where you know people are going to be discussing whether a given wifi router is any good or not.
Which has the side effect of concentrating things even more on those sites. If the place you can trust for networking equipment reviews is Reddit, then probably you'll also comment somewhere on Reddit next time you get bitten by a bad one and want a second opinion or just to warn people. And reddit gets bigger still.
Google being useless for something like product reviews means that any smaller sites that are any good are not getting the traffic they deserve, because they're being outcompeted by the ads and the fake review sites.
People still need the content, though. But how do you find that review without a search engine? You have to resort to that even though Google sucks for the general web, it's still very much useful if you restrict it to something very particular. You have to know where to start though, so you have to resort to one of the 4-5 huge sites like Reddit or Hacker News where you know people are going to be discussing whether a given wifi router is any good or not.
Which has the side effect of concentrating things even more on those sites. If the place you can trust for networking equipment reviews is Reddit, then probably you'll also comment somewhere on Reddit next time you get bitten by a bad one and want a second opinion or just to warn people. And reddit gets bigger still.