Right now in my field (cryptography and security) the number of papers is exploding. The real battle at this point is not only finding time to read the papers,

Right now in my field (cryptography and security) the number of papers is exploding. The real battle at this point is not only finding time to read the papers, it's even finding time to learn about them. Unfortunately self-publishing (AKA preprints) just means we're producing a lot of papers nobody has time to read, many of them with obvious flaws and bad presentation that could easily be fixed. Peer-review is one rating system that helps to filter some signal from the noise.