For me, it's a few things.
It's the feel of true anonymity, and the basis that everything and everyone is on some level playing field. Your status or inter-community work, unless dependent upon forwarding the discussions themselves, doesn't matter and will be judged on its own merits. Posters have right to free speech in every sense; there is never any system in place to cause any type of circlejerk to form or completely shutting out valid arguments whenever something goes against the grain.
The most sense of gratification you'd get is from reactions. And those are just ways of showing what users are thinking generally, rather than "Hey I like this" or "Hey I fuckin' hate this and you as a person". That's not to say circlejerks don't form, but they're usually based on information that is already laid bare to anyone following the story, and has a shitton of evidence to compound to that argument. There is no "he said, she said" bullshit; it's the epitome of "pics or it didn't happen": provide something if it isn't easily accessible, lest you look like a dumbass in a thread about other dumbasses.
And that's the other thing: people love taking the absolute piss out of actual morons/stupid ideals online, it's just how the Internet is. But when you have a community dedicated to archiving what they do (while the impressions from those looking from the outside in seems stalker-like) it ends up being a chaotic good for actual discussion on the topics based on the facts and only the facts. Some of which, like in Shmorky's case, can actually help take down potentially dangerous people from hurting others. It's a a common goal each thread can strive towards.
Also the mods keep complete stupidity from taking over threads, so there's that.
