I definitely want journals to be arbiters of quality. I have very limited time and want to read the best, and at the same time I don't want to read misinformation or disinformation.

They seem well-positioned to be such arbiters. Who else do you suggest and why are they better?

Nobody can possibly read every article and few have the expertise to decide. There is no reason to think the 'wisdom of the crowds' is reliable - and lots of experience and research showing it is not, and easily manipulated by nonsense. I don't want Reddit or Twitter.

Maybe we should pay the ones that put in the work and leverage their experience to judge the quality which would be the reviewers. In this age of disintermediation journals add little value in providing infrastructure or paying (if at all) reviewers and that money is in any case mostly public money.

> Who else do you suggest and why are they better?

The arbiters are just our colleagues, at the end of the day. The journal is just the organisational mechanism, one of many possible mechanisms.

For example, I follow a weekly reading list (https://superlab.ca) published by a group of motor control labs at Western University. Those people are my arbiters of quality.

I want to continue having arbiters, and I want it to be the same people (broadly speaking). I just don't want them to be organised around journals because journals are toxic and lead to concentrated power over scientific narratives.