[jbiggley]

I do research as a hobby. It resulted in a published data set and news article that was picked up by global media outlets. The article led to a documentary.

And, I just keep doing the research because I love the research part of it. I find it relaxing and it allows me to stretch my tech skills at the same time.

[pclmulqdq]

I have contributed to and written 4 papers "for fun," and have another one going through review. GP seems to want to do it for the prestige marker (the publication), but that publication on its own is kind of worthless. The quality and enjoyment of the research is what matters.

[nico]

I have the impression that there are a lot of people doing interesting things on their own and probably not sharing them. Maybe in big part because they are scared of getting rejected

I want to be able to see what “normal” people are doing. Would love something like a GitHub/stack exchange of people just openly and curiously sharing their research with other “normal” people

“Serious” research is just too serious and exclusive for people who are not doing it to become researchers nor care about scientific prestige

[jandrewrogers]

There is a surprising amount of excellent computer science research that is done as a private hobby where no attempt is made to publish it. An important aspect of this is that the goal of the research is often to solve the problem. Publishing it is irrelevant to that objective and a tedious chore that can be readily dismissed if it is not your job. It may not be a satisfying answer but in my experience "I have better things to do with my time" is a primary reason to not publish amateur research.

This naturally creates two problems. The first is discovery amidst the noise of non-serious research activity. To find it you have to be aware the research is happening and you literally have to talk to the people doing it. One thing NSA used to (maybe still does) do very well was finding non-academic researchers doing interesting theoretical computer science work that was never going to end up in a journal. The second is that there are a couple domains where there are decades of accumulated research where almost none of it was published, so it is difficult to bootstrap yourself into the state-of-the-art because so little of it was written down. There is also the reality that some traditional sponsors of non-academic computer science research have asymmetric advantage as an explicit objective, which benefits from non-publication.

[pclmulqdq]

I actually believe the main problem that keeps "normal" people out of "serious" research is the cultural part around writing a good research paper, getting through review, and reviewing papers.

ArXiv is close to what you suggest and helps with the last two, but there's no real reason for anyone to read your paper on ArXiv without any authority signal that it's worth reading.