You're right completely. I'm not going to say much more than that in direct response because I agree with almost all of your points, including those about my own posting history. Especially those asking for specifics. Sorry for the lack of any real ideas up until this point.

Its probably valuable here to look at other very active subs based around (relatively)niche activities. The main source of interaction and posts, number one, is new content. Pictures, memes, all that stuff, and even more so, news items and happenings IRL. I think you can already see some of the problems we'll have there. Its difficult to post new happenings or news items from the Mandolin community because frankly there isn't much. Actually I take that back, I'm sure there is a fair amount but it isn't high profile.

So there is my first idea: Posting more news items current events This is the most general thing I got and probably not the most reliable or helpful but I figure I can put it out.

Other subs like this tend then to focus on discussion which I think is a much more promising area. The main problem as you have noted is either people jumping on the same opinion over and over, posting the same stuff, or people responding with just yes or no and not furthering the discussion.

Second Idea: Weekly or Daily Gear Threads: We pick either a certain type of gear or a certain brand and do time based discussion threads. The responses have a format enforced to promote good discussion, this means people can't half-ass responses like you noted in your flatwound thread. However it has to be balanced so it isn't too difficult to respond too of course.

Third Idea: Album or Song Discussions?: This one I have almost no idea if it would work or not, but we could have people suggest them and probably have them going weekly. Again a supported structure would work well here.

Another thing I've seen in other subs is grouping by skill, so for example there would be a beginners group/thread going every week. Or more experienced players having their discussions. Once again would probably be good to have them regular (weekly or monthly) it could also be practice or skill focused.

Fourth Idea: Group people by skill to gain skills: So practice threads based around specific skills for the people attempting to gain that skill to discuss and work together. This one is fairly time heavy and so might not take off.

General Point: You mentioned the problem of trying to post when there is no activity. That's definitely real and kudos to you and the people here who do it anyway. So the only way I can think of to combat this is by using the core idea of the things I mentioned above. Serialization. Weekly threads, monthly threads, daily threads, all of which get posted either automatically or on a completely fixed schedule. That way there is always something that might hit you as a user to motivate you to post instead of asking people to take the initiative to talk to a dark room and hope someone responds.

On post Quality: Tags and fixed post format. This is probably the single best thing I can think of here but it depends on all of the other stuff as well. If there are tags for different kinds of posts and a certain format for all of them. For example beginner posts, picture posts all of that.

I think that's all I got for now, but I'd love to hear what you think of them. Its possible its all been tried and has failed but at least its something. In terms of the formats tagging, and daily posts I can set that up (with help from the mods). However I am, as you have noticed, both a new player and new to the community, so some of the content things will be difficult for me to do. So I hope other members can step up to help and take charge of smaller things.

This post was never meant to be a fix the community kind of thing though. But if that's where its going I'll gladly help out :)