In practice I'm not seeing much of a difference. Maybe it is just being in ML, where if you wait for conferences you're far behind. If a paper is that shitty, it is usually very apparent. Like if a paper isn't in latex you know... I mean there's a lot of garbage in conferences and journals too, I just haven't found it to be a meaningful signal.
And it is still silly that people call it "peer review." Peer review is not 3-4 randos briefly glancing my work in an adversarial setting who say my work is not novel because it is the same as some unrelated work that they didn't read either; peer review is the grad student building on top of my work, peer review is lucidrains rewriting my work from scratch, it is Ross Wightman integrating it into timm and retraining, it is the forks that use my work for projects (hobby or professional). Peer review is peers looking and reviewing. More peer review happens on Twitter than these conferences. You can say these conferences and journals are a form of peer review, but we gotta stop saying that just because something is a preprint that it isn't peer reviewed. That's just incorrect. Peer review is when peers review.
And it is still silly that people call it "peer review." Peer review is not 3-4 randos briefly glancing my work in an adversarial setting who say my work is not novel because it is the same as some unrelated work that they didn't read either; peer review is the grad student building on top of my work, peer review is lucidrains rewriting my work from scratch, it is Ross Wightman integrating it into timm and retraining, it is the forks that use my work for projects (hobby or professional). Peer review is peers looking and reviewing. More peer review happens on Twitter than these conferences. You can say these conferences and journals are a form of peer review, but we gotta stop saying that just because something is a preprint that it isn't peer reviewed. That's just incorrect. Peer review is when peers review.