[ohmygodel]

Niche venues cater to specialists in an area. Even in specialized areas there is more output than an expert can keep up with, and these smaller venues generally perform valuable filtering as well.

"my brain hasn't collapsed from the inrush of poorly filtered information" Of course not. However, you are either wasting a ton of time or you are using some other indirect method to decide what papers are useful to read. I'd love to hear if you think your personal approach to filtering non-reviewed content is superior to relying on peer review.

[bmastenbrook]

Once again, I'm not convinced the specialists are actually filtering usefully instead of juat defining the boundaries of their niche.

You've assumed that the non-reviewed content I'm reading is in the form of papers. It isn't; it's blog posts and code.