Many comments here lament that adtech won, and that corporate speak is still the norm. All true, but many of the more “structural” premises have held, and we just don’t see them because they’re the norm now. People are much more empowered to know the truth: Amazon reviews, restaurant reviews etc. Yes they can be manipulated, and yes counterfeit products can make their way into the supply chain, but we are forgetting…
As to Yelp, I don't recall the era before Yelp as an era of going to bad restaurants. For informal restaurants, we'd go to wherever friends had been, if the friends said they'd had a good experience. And for fancier restaurants, those were reviewed in the newspapers. Or if you lived in a college town, then every restaurant, even the informal ones, would get a review in the weekly. Like, for instance, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where the Independent would post a review of every restaurant, both the informal and the formal.
I think an honest appraisal of the Internet would have to look hard at its failure to live up to its promise, and why that happened. For most of the 20th Century it was assumed that if knowledge could become universal, then economic growth would increase, and yet the opposite has happened. The years since 2000 have seen below average economic growth and below average productivity growth. Figuring out why economic growth faltered when information was becoming abundant has to be one of the big questions that economics needs to answer.