I'm all in favor of citizen scientists. However, a lot of citizen scientists get ignored because their science is very bad. This is not because "Academia is out of touch with the word" or "feeling threatened." It's because good science requires three things ; an intimate and painfully deep knowledge of a subject , lots and lots of scientists working on the same subject, and lots and lot of time.
The big confusion people have about "doing science" is; being smart isn't enough. Being intimately-versed, trained, and experienced in the topic does.
Good science can't be done after reading "<Science topic> for dummies" and watching a lot of Youtube videos. It can't even be done after reading a single solid textbook on the subject matter.
Luckily, we have a fantastic system for parsing good science from bad. It's called "Consensus of the scientific community." Simply put - if your science is being ignored, it's probably because your science is immature or simply sucks.
And this makes science is a difficult subject to self-evaluate because, unlike plumbing or medicine, there's no immediate indicators of bad science. I.e. If you do crappy plumbing, your basement floods. If you do bad medicine, your patient dies. If you do bad science, well - you just get ignored and start developing conspiracy theories about why the "scientists are threatened by you" instead of realizing your science sucks.
