It varied for me. For example I lurked on /r/watches and would watch as the group mind ripped to shreds anyone who dared showing a digital that wasn’t Casio or a fashion watch. /R/PLC stayed good the whole time. I guess because we had a common enemy, everyone else in the universe.
I enjoyed down voting this comment.
I don’t know anything about the drama but back in the day I was in DevOps and pretty much every engineering tool we had strongly urged us to run it on the RHEL family. Also it was kinda nice that there was a phone number to call when things were going to heck. Plus for some reason I could always get drivers to work faster on fedora, which might have been my knowledge base. Not sure
Also for a corporation a red hat license is pennies so for them just having official support is worth it.
For individuals I don’t think it really serves any use.
I ended up losing a friend because of reddit. They found it and just morphed from cheerful to always in a bad mood. Occasionally picking arguments with me from stuff they had seen on that site. At one point I just told them to stop going there, that they were becoming a nasty person because of it. She said she did but I didn’t believe her.
Early march 2020 I am dealing with the lockdown and watching my entire life deathspiral. My toddler won’t wear a mask, her older sister is crying because she misses her friends at school, I have no idea if I will have a job next week, and my wife is a nurse going into NYC hospital every day. All this going on and my friend sends me an email demanding I get her pictures of the corona beer public burnings going on. That she knows for a fact are happening because she read it on reddit.
I called her and I won’t repeat what I said because I am highly confident it would get me in trouble with LEOs. Not a “hey I know you have small children and your wife works in a hospital in the hardest hit city in the US, are you okay? Is there anything I can do to help?”. No, just an email trying to make fun of the people in my country.