Everything else is just groupthink and tribalism, just look at r/politics or r/news. What's worse is that even neutral subreddits like r/gaming are prone to the mods a.k.a janitors being pissy and deleting anything that doesn't conform to the status quo (looking at you r/TheLastofUs).
And surprise surprise, the post got removed. xd
The sidebar wikis of hobbyist communities is packed full of good content, curated over years by the community so usually it's a very good "starter pack" knowledge to save time on your own research.
The thing is, at some point this is probably gonna happen to reddit as well, so enjoy it while it lasts. Just the other day i read in a subreddit about people being offered things in return for favorable reviews on certain products on those subreddits. Sigh.
Also Reddit and other forums are just forums. There's plenty of other places to have discussions.
In fact Reddit allows anyone to create sub reddits.
Why can't a group of like-minded people who want to have "non-status quo" discussions create their own communities for it?
That's how Reddit overtook Digg.
But I think what's really the complaint here is that people don't like that they don't have a mainstream audience.
They want to have their posts have the widest reach possible for ego and they don't like moderators deleting their posts or being downvoted.
At the end of the day none of it really matters. Why are people waging pointless online wars about internet communities?
Do they think they're shaping society?
Resetera is the neogaf successor, so you're more correct than you realize
I am thinking that they think "yes".
I can imagine teenagers that are still developing their personal values, and exploring the site, are most suseptible to being influenced by the big subs.
Most of the smaller, niche communities I follow are full of nice and helpful people. One example being /r/MTB.