I freely admit I am not an academic. I just note that there is a lot of negative sentiment about people trying to get stuff published, and a lot of it looks from an external perspective to be elitist gatekeeping.

Please read that again, I am not on the inside here, so anything I say is just based on reading stuff from aspiring academics and articles in that mode. To my amateur eyes, there seems to be a problem in the academic world, of some sort, but how big it is, or isn't, I don't know.

Is that ok?

So, assume I, a complete amateur, no PhD, no connections or academic record to speak of (I have an MSc only, from the 90s, in a third world country) thinks I've discovered something, how do I go about "publishing"?

To me, I could easily see value where I self publish somewhere, where other similar non-connected people can see, crowd source the verification (basically peer review) and if it turns out to be useful, it'll be used.

Maybe it would be easy for me to get it formally published, but I doubt it.