Philosophy is an important field because it provides some premises for all other fields. Issues that are very relevant to many fields include: how to be rational and objective, how to deal with bias, critical thinking, organizing knowledge, debate, how to learn effectively, how to find and correct errors, problem solving and goal accomplishing methods, and integrity.
Philosophy is an underserved field. There isn't a lot of good work being done in philosophy. A lot of the effort is basically about history of philosophy and isn't really bringing useful breakthroughs relevant to other fields today like modern science. A lot of philosophy work is inductivist, justificationist, indecisive, etc. It broadly ignores Karl Popper and there aren't good debates happening. Ideas like JTB (knowledge = justified, true, belief) and credences are bad.
It's hard to find philosophy bloggers worth reading or philosophy YouTubers worth watching. The field feels pretty empty. It's not like video games where there's tons of decent material available. It also feels very empty compared to politics. This is partly because academic philosophers engage with the public at low rates, which is partly because the public doesn't like them, which they would partly blame on the public not having enough expertise and intelligence. I put more blame on the philosophers lacking communication skill, having dumb ideas, obscuring the lack of substance with complexity, etc. Academic philosophy is a field that alienated Richard Feynman and Karl Popper; it's not just ignorant or dumb people who are unimpressed. Lots of smart, well-read people think academic philosophy isn't very good currently.
And academic philosophers are very into gatekeeping, so if a lay person reads some of their favorite books and has some ideas about them, they still generally won't want to engage with that person. They also don't mind ignoring Objectivism even though Rand is one of the most famous and best selling philosophers. They aren't really trying to engage with stuff that resonates with more people. Lots of them are happy in their little niche where they often play office politics and social climb instead of actually challenging each other appropriately. Part of what many of them like about their niche is the lack of criticism and lack of threatening types of debate that would challenge their key claims or premises in a way where they could potentially clearly lose the debate.
Most philosophers don't even try to work on rationality and other really useful, practical topics. Even the ones whose speciality is epistemology generally turn it into something abstract and disconnected from decision making, learning and debate.
Less Wrong (including Effective Altruism) cares about rationality but they aren't mainstream or academic philosophy, they're quite hostile to Critical Rationalism (even without my addition of rejecting credences, weighted factors, etc., which they'd really dislike), they won't debate and choose not to engage with lots of criticism, and they moderate their forums to limit dissent. Objectivism also cares about rationality but Objectivists don't actually try to study and analyze as much as Less Wrong and also broadly aren't open to debate or free speech discussion either. I've never found the discussion quality to be good at Critical Rationalism forums either and I haven't found Theory of Constraints forums at all. These sorts of forums allow some discussion and have some argumentative members, but if you want more structured discussions/debates that actually go somewhere and reach any important conclusions, rather than short verbal skirmishes that people quit in the middle, then people stop talking to you or moderators intervene.
A lot of people, including academic philosophers, seem satisfied by Facebook and Twitter for discussion. Social media isn't designed for serious discussions that reach important conclusions. Academic journals aren't designed for back-and-forth discussions either and are gatekept. In general, most intellectuals seem to think of debate as something that happens in voice, preferably in person, as a one-day event, rather than something that's best done in text over a period of many days (having some voice debates with a time limit like two hours is fine but I don't think those should be primary).
The people who will debate some on the internet tend to not think of themselves as top experts, tend not think of the conclusions of their debates as being important to the world, and if they start losing a debate they often either flake or get angry/upset/tilted. It's hard to get anyone to have multi-day text debates and take them really seriously. That kind of activity just doesn't have enough people in general, not just for philosophy topics.
I don't see a bunch of great text debates happening between other people; the primary issue isn't lack of access or gatekeeping, it's that people don't do this stuff enough.
You can find some long disorganized debates on internet forums, but it's hard to find anything that's structured in a way to reach clear conclusions. In my experience, as soon as I start asking for structured debate and bringing up suggested methods to accomplish it, people stop debating. In the past, I had no trouble getting some long disorganized debates that failed to stay on topic, keep track of everything that was said, and reach clear conclusions. But now that I'm looking for more effective discussions, and have some ideas about methods (and am open to alternative methods if anyone else has ideas about how to have productive discussions), I find it's hard to get discussions. And I don't think that is about me because I don't see other people having those kinds of conversations without me.
I think many people don't want discussions that result in clear conclusions because then they can lose. I think most people don't like to risk losing. Also, most people aren't good at cooperative critical thinking and pursuing the same topic in a way that no one loses; if it's not adversarial debate, people tend to lose interest and flake, maybe because a lot of their motivation is the "someone is wrong on the internet" type or because the internet forum posters don't see themselves as capable of doing serious, important research and the academics don't do research that way.
Tons of people do their own thing and make their own claims without being willing to thoroughly address much criticism. They attract fans, funding, promotions, etc., or they fail to. There is a competition to get those resources where people and their theories try to be more appealing than others rather than directly debating others about which theories are true. This happens in many intellectual fields, like various sciences, not just in philosophy.
I don't have a solution. I just think this is an important problem that's worth bringing up. There's a lack of people doing useful work on key areas of philosophy that underly other fields, and there's a broad lack of organized, effective discussion and debate in the world.
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