Film discussion, yes. It's a complete madhouse there, and idiocy at 300 mph.
I remember someone starting a topic about the alleged dominance of some color in some marginal movie, and his opening comments were pages long, and invited dozens of replies. And this kind of topic was repeated thousands of times over. Water water everywhere nor any drop to drink.
That sounds… bizarre. Half-tempted to go check it out for myself, but I won’t, I’ve deleted Reddit following my disappointing forays. I guess this is a question of general writing etiquette, right, which is now severely lacking everywhere. Funny thing is, when I was there I was more irked by the awful grammar and the slang and the abbreviations (the opposite of what you’re saying, really).
The replies side of things on Reddit just doesn’t seem very well-thought through for something this massive. I remember reading a long, in-depth thread about AI about seven months ago, before I went off Reddit completely. It was fascinating and rather disturbing, but that’s for another day. Like you said, every long-form reply invited several long-form replies, and I really wanted to follow the conversation, because it was very astute, but the format just made it utterly impossible.
I even went and loaded up that same thread on my laptop, but it still wouldn’t let me read most of it in any kind of order without crashing. I suppose Reddit wasn’t really designed with this kind of thing in mind.