Curated information discovery and sharing that I genuinely cannot get anywhere else in a public manner - maybe Lobsters is a competitor, but that's focused exclusively on software development. I have more than a handful of articles and comments favorited here that have helped me either help others or help myself either professionally or recreationally; they've directed me to create personal projects, given me conversation topics, helped me get the most out of interviews with companies, identify social habits and trends.

There's a lot of noise in regards to the signal-to-noise ratio, and I have my own biases and petty views (i.e., it's common for users to post articles from people I dislike sharing the same industry with), but there's simply so much to open yourself up to in terms of even reading the comments for a submission I flat-out dislike or otherwise don't particularly care for.

There haven't been any miracles on this website in terms of feeling part of a unified community or experiencing random bouts of generosity in person-to-person interactions, but I consider spending time on HN so valuable that I'd willingly pay a membership fee to preserve some kind of member standard like SomethingAwful hoped to do with the "10bux" membership fee (paying $10 to access the site's forums).