I’ve worked at a couple of Mom & Pop places in the south during my youth, and generally they were terrible with money, racist, and tried avoiding taxes any way they could.
Small sample size with a sprinkle of confirmation bias on my end, but there are usually signs.
Always need help? Discount on cash purchases? Making the customer pay the credit card transaction fee?
There are many others, but those are generally the biggest ones where management is just interested in customer sympathy and the bottom line.
Engagement is way up in normal forums like politics etc. compared to 2 years ago.
Oddly, since the community is so small I get some news articles way faster than if you were on Reddit. By a few hours in most cases unless it’s some crazy event.
But the niche ones are still struggling. The initial boom from the api exodus was good, but momentum quickly faded after ~2 months.
This stuff will grow eventually. There was a metric on Reddit ages ago that listed the top 1% of contributors were responsible for 99% of the content. Most were lurkers or non account holders.