Agreed that technical specs cannot easily be crowdsourced. And even comprehensive reviews quickly get outdated when new products release. I remember there used

Agreed that technical specs cannot easily be crowdsourced. And even comprehensive reviews quickly get outdated when new products release. I remember there used to be a Google engineer who would review USB-C cables on Amazon for compliance.[0] After looking at this again Amazon apparently ended up banning the sale of out of spec cables altogether. That kind of thing is the only real way to protect consumers. We can't rely on Google engineers to leave reviews for our products on Amazon. I do think products with clearly defined technical specs should in general be reported to the consumer. Same thing with nutrition labels. The lower the skill needed to evaluate something and the more well defined the problem space is, the easier it is to crowd source. For example Open Street Map works because the barrier to entry is relatively low and new cities aren't coming out every day. Similarly IMDB has a section that allows users to give their own parental rating to movies with their own explanation. That can compete with MPA film ratings because again the barrier to entry is low and movies don't change after they are released (in general). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benson_Leung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benson_Leung