You are probably right about postgrads. Although i would not consider myself the best reviewer i was really investing time and effort to produce a fair and honest review with the "limited" knowledge of the field i had, and i was probably a better reviewer than "experts" who would produce 1 line reviews or generic comments "add more references". However i would beg for highly-technical reviews, providing harsh theoretical and technical feedback, which i guess would come from more experienced or expert reviewers than postgrads or myself. And by expert i mean people who have knowledge and publications on that specific paper topic, e.g. you might not be able to provide expert feedback on P2P or distributed networks just because you are an expert in QoS (network buzzwords here, please ignore :) ). Which is probably an effect of what you mentioned; the amount of conferences/workshops/journals and papers submitted and lack of incentive from people to review.
The ~30 papers were an outcome of collaborative R&D projects with universities and companies, most of those just having my name in the authors and requiring me to quickly read and comment them, instead of spending effort to produce the results presented. From a third person perspective this somehow justifies the 3rd point of my original post on how these mafias are created and maintained. The thing is that i didn't care for citations or more paper invitations because my position or wage didn't depend on them (i was just doing my research for the implementation and the trips in the conferences my papers were accepted) and eventually i am not doing R&D anymore, however i can imagine how unfair this whole setup is for people who want to follow an academic path.
> However i would beg for highly-technical reviews, providing harsh theoretical and technical feedback, which i guess would come from more experienced or expert reviewers than postgrads or myself.
Grad students are plenty capable of writing these reviews. They might even be responsible for most of them. But the problem is still that there's very little incentive to write these kinds of reviews. As a reviewer, I don't even know how the author will accept it -- will they engage with the criticism and re-work their paper? Or will they ignore it, mildly re-write the introduction, and then re-submit to the next conference? I have seen enough examples of the latter to blunt my enthusiasm as a reviewer for providing detailed constructive feedback. Unfortunately, I think the most useful feedback may come after acceptance, when you give the talk/present the poster and people actually pay attention. It's much easier to interact in good faith when the person is right in front of you.
I sympathize with relative "outsiders" to a field who can only get expert attention through reviews. The above issue makes things difficult. Attending workshops can be useful for this.
> The ~30 papers were an outcome of collaborative R&D projects with universities and companies, most of those just having my name in the authors and requiring me to quickly read and comment them, instead of spending effort to produce the results presented.
Ah, this is not the norm in theory. Our author order is alphabetical, so the working assumption is that every co-author has seriously contributed to at least one (and hopefully all) of 1) original idea for the paper 2) technical work (proving a result, implementing an algorithm) 3) actually writing the paper. There are still people who publish 20 papers a year, but this is rare.
Yeah I’m in cryptography and our papers typically have 1-3 authors. Meanwhile the broader computer security conferences routinely have papers with 8+ authors and I’m thinking “How can 8 people write a paper and not produce total garbage?” Well it’s because most of them didn’t actually write anything in the paper, they just contributed to a code base or data collection.
The ~30 papers were an outcome of collaborative R&D projects with universities and companies, most of those just having my name in the authors and requiring me to quickly read and comment them, instead of spending effort to produce the results presented. From a third person perspective this somehow justifies the 3rd point of my original post on how these mafias are created and maintained. The thing is that i didn't care for citations or more paper invitations because my position or wage didn't depend on them (i was just doing my research for the implementation and the trips in the conferences my papers were accepted) and eventually i am not doing R&D anymore, however i can imagine how unfair this whole setup is for people who want to follow an academic path.