For people, it's a fort. Or a warm place, or a playground, or a gallery. Some place to shout into the ether and, hopefully, get an echo.
For companies, it is another place to harvest data, only with a few more hurdles, and far too level for their preferences.
For me it is a petri dish of social concepts and preconceptions, designed to accelerate all the stages of cultural evolution, but especially decay and diaspora.