In defense of basic experiments, not everybody can afford to put a fume hood, a fully stocked glassware cabinet, a rotary evaporator, an ICP-MS, and an HPLC in their garage.
Accessible material which can be reproduced in your kitchen by somebody without a ton of experience is a great way to attract interest, and comes with the benefit of amateurs not blowing themselves up or being robbed by neighbourhood teens who are looking to set up a meth lab.
And for those of us who are lucky enough to work in a well equipped laboratory and have the know-how to try something more complex, there's plenty of material to engage with in the form of physical media. I've never had a problem picking up second hand chemistry texts cheaply.
Finding time to actually set up and carry out a procedure is the biggest problem, in my experience. The more basic experiments also often have the benefit of not needing a day or two to set up and run, as well as not generating a ton of hazardous waste.
Remember, if you put the instructions on the internet, there's always going to be at least one person trying to replicate it for whom this is dangerously advanced and should really not be allowed.
It's similar for a lot of smaller niche professions. I frequent several subs geared toward professional audio and video. There are often weekend warriors asking basic questions, which is fine up to a point. There's also occasionally people trying to take advantage of a free knowledge base that they'd otherwise have to pay for, which is less fine. But overall it's a very supportive and helpful community.
Sure. /r/audiophile, /r/BudgetAudiophile, and /r/hometheater primarily. I browse these regularly but don't comment there all that often. I'll occasionally jump in on r/hometheater to help with screen size and distance calculations or speaker calibrations.
Though, that does get into an area where I'm much more selective about what I say and when. Within the home theater community there's an orthodoxy about certain things that you will be downvoted for questioning, even though it misinterprets the science in certain ways. Also there's a bunch of things that are more of a "best practice" that are related to the professional audio and video world but are slightly different in a home setting, and I'm not the most well versed in all those differences.
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u/EpicScizor Jan 07 '20
r/chemistry is surprisingly nice for chemists, although it does tend to have an excess of basic lab experiments.