If there are a lot of people subscribed to the territory in which you post, I think you have better odds of meaningful interactions on your post because they get notified when a post shows up in the territory.

Subscribers seem like they would be more likely to read, zap, comment (I wonder if this could be measured).

I don't zap when something is in the wrong territory. I suspect other folks don't either.

There's also the ugliness of it. I haven't met anyone with outdoor furniture in their living room.

I would be annoyed if my favorite territory got taken over by non-related posts. It never occurred to me whether people would spend much time figuring out where their post goes, and assumed it is obvious for everyone like it is me. Maybe there should be fewer, broader territories? I don't know. I only use a few, and occasionally visit the Recent tab to see if anything is interesting. I'm not like most people, so I'm not interested in much else besides Agora, meta, music, and general discussion unrelated to sports, politics, etc.

Im still waiting for the NSFW territory 😆

Way back before stackers could make territories I was banging on about how there should be a ~miscellaneous. You can always drop random thoughts in the @saloon, though.

On your main question, there are different levels of engagement in each territory. The owners may be more or less active and stackers can subscribe to or mute territories.

~econ has prizes for top posts and so do others.

Basically, the benefit side of the ledger does differ between territories.

I subscribe to some territories, so I'll get notifications for posts in them, and am a lot more likely to see those than ones on the front page. And if someone's throwing clearly off-topic posts in a territory I subscribe to, I'm likely to take actions including ignoring the posts, ignoring the user, downzapping the posts, and muting the user (depending on how often and how bad it gets).

i think we don't have enough users to have enough diversity in interests across territories, so a few will be getting all the action

for random or misc tho , we can just use askSN

Yes we don't have ~random but we have ~alter_native which I think serves the same purpose.

Posting in right territory always gets attention of Stackers while posting in the wrong territory gets discarded.

If you post in the wrong territory you will get spooped by the stacker ghost

(this is canon)

For low budget stories they cannot afford the cost those how complete some jobs on some platforms to get paid like yzer app or microlancer or even some similar platforms, but for those how work on real payment platforms like sats back or even exchange LTC to BTC LN they could afford cost even 14 satoshis for a post reply, so it depends on how you generate your income to pay for satoshis here on SN.