The niches basically succeed because they aren't worth it to marketers and "influencers" to shit up with "content." It's awful when a nice community gets too big, because once it does it's now worth money to do that.

I also think this is the magic that forums used to have, and Reddit is basically a convenient platform for forum hosting.

The problem I have with Reddit is every subreddit seems filled with amateurs posting the same starter questions daily, never looking at the feed to see these questions have been asked and answered daily.

That is not only Reddit issue any professional forum will get that problem.

That is basically what stackoverflow solves by aggressive moderation and closing duplicates also aggressively.

But then you get “people on this site are bad and don’t like me” where only thing they do is dealing with amateurs.

So for me it is interesting problem to solve and I hope GPT will be able to solve it by dealing with amateurs questions and leaving forums for professionals to have better space for discussion.

A niche sub equivalent succeeding on, say, Lemmy would either require the existing reddit sub to close and migrate there or for the Lemmy active user count to grow to the point where a critical mass of users interested in that niche want to discuss it there. There needs to be some way on Lemmy to promote those forums as well. A couple of niche forums I'm subscribed to are gaining a little traction, but I only found out they existed when they were mentioned on the reddit subs they're based on.

s,subreddits,events, and s,/default subs, festivals, in your first paragraph and it is still valid.

Saying that because I noticed this effect as a young festival goer. As the size of the event grew, the number of people I'd much rather not be around also increased. I am suspecting something similar is also at play here, in addition to the bot-effect...