There are many examples of extremely rigorous and high-quality work, occasionally having significant influence on later academic discourse or other areas of society, conducted by people on the internet who are doing this work as a hobby.

Examples:

  1. Many concepts and terms used in gender studies, queer studies, and feminist discourse (and therefore in mainstream society today) originated in online communities like Tumblr and the online chat rooms of old.
  2. Many of the blog posts written by Brian Tomasik are seminal contributions to suffering-focused ethics and wild animal welfare research. These posts are still cited in peer-reviewed publications on these topics (including my own papers!).
  3. There are many communities that are compiling databases of serious public interest—there are many examples here, including Project Gutenberg (which organises the digitisation and quality control of books and then publishes these as freely available ebooks); LibriVox (similar concept but for audiobooks); Wikipedia (of course!); and countless others.
  4. Lost Media Wiki documents pieces of lost media and whether or not they have been subsequently found by community members. Some of these pieces can be genuinely important: this includes a collection of three unpublished short stories by the novelist J.D. Salinger, found on eBay and then published on this website, and Caper in the Castro, a 1989 point-and-click game for Macintosh that is believed to be the first ever queer video game. The relevance of these two examples for American literary history and queer history, respectively, should be self-evident.
  5. Speaking of old video games, The Cutting Room Floor is a website dedicated to “unearthing and researching unused and cut content from video games”. The pages on the original Pokemon games are extremely cool.
  6. There is a community of “bootleg MTG” players, who are proud to use proxied (fake or non-official) MTG cards of various levels of quality (see r/bootlegmtg on Reddit). A subset of this community likes to use proxies printed by the company Make Playing Cards (see r/mpcproxies on Reddit). Now, this community is very well-organised; there is even a website called MPCFill that lets you import a list of cards and, drawing from repository of card images stored on the community’s various Google drives, produces an XML file. This file can then be processed using a piece of software written by a community member, which takes the XML file and automates the process of creating the order from Make Playing Cards. This is otherwise a time-consuming and fiddly process, and watching it automated via a Terminal window is extremely impressive.
  7. This extremely obscure French-language webpage, whose age should be self-evident, remains a key source for digitising films stored on analogue Super8 tape.
  8. Some of the best information for ensuring the welfare of ornamental fish (e.g. goldfish) can be found in online aquarium communities (e.g. the subreddits r/aquarium and r/goldfish). I’m only aware of one peer-reviewed publication that gives meaningful recommendations for goldfish welfare (which I summarise here), and the information in that paper is similar to, though far less detailed than, the information that can be gleaned from these online aquarium communities. The information available from these online communities but not the academic literature includes detailed and complex chemical interactions between various water quality parameters (e.g. ammonia, temperature and pH), which shows make abundantly clear how seriously this hobby is being taken!