I agree that reporting of factual things like whether part of the hotel is under construction or whether there is a loud nightclub on the premises are useful bits of info that sometimes you won't find anywhere else than tripadvisor.

Unfortunately, tripadvisor just pulls a lot of the other info that ought to be requisite parts of each hotel's profile (hotel shuttle, resort fees, internet access in rooms, etc) from other sites like expedia. In fact, one of the weakest features of tripadvisor is the map feature -- the maps are too small, they are not sufficiently detailed, and they are littered with ads for other properties as the default. (The hotels.com site, as one example, has much more useful maps than tripadvisor. Kayak's maps, on the other hand, are a very mixed bag because a lot of the mapping information is just plain wrong.) If it weren't for these complaints, I'd view the decline in the usefulness of the other aspects of tripadvisor more favorably.