Actual insightful conversation on a variety of subjects. Especially current events, I notice this the most when discussing content updates in video games. While official forums exist a lot of the games I play essentially use their subreddit as a semi-official community with devs being active participants.
/r/eve and /r/pathofexile are great examples of this.
It’s hard to discount the success Reddit has had over the last decade or so positioning themselves as the “front page of the internet” giving people a forum to discuss all manner of subjects.
As I understand a lot of the hatred against Reddit and spez specifically comes from his attempts to monetize this phenomenon, not how effective/popular the site was.
Some do. One of the biggest wonders of my life has been growing up and learning how many women out there are actually into being choked, tied up, degraded and all other variety of sexual kinks.