I've been reading the site myself on-and-off for several years now, and while it certainly has a particular spin much of the time, an awful lot of what shows up

I've been reading the site myself on-and-off for several years now, and while it certainly has a particular spin much of the time, an awful lot of what shows up there as critique is just basic common sense. If you can't see that then perhaps you lack common sense yourself - because it seems that "common sense" isn't really so common after all. And certainly not all of the comments "are just a bunch of back-slapping" - in fact things can get quite heated at times. Which you would know if you'd actually read the site in depth and to any great extent. There may have been valid complaints in the past that the site was sloppy and too one-sided. But the tone has changed quite a bit over recent years, in that they now try to keep everything more balanced and in context. For example, they may print large parts of an article while highlighting and commenting on certain portions of it, rather than just presenting a few sentences from it that they think are relevant, with little or no context. They will also try and make sure to point back to original sources whenever they can, and so on. They still get it wrong sometimes, though.