Along with all the silliness, there are a lot of smart people posting very interesting things on the forum. Open, free for anyone to read (in a hack-the-finance-planet) sorta way.
You have people writing in-dept thesis' on which way a stock is heading / what happened yesterday / how to "play" the trade. Its clear some of the people are serious as they put hundreds of thousands up against their theory.
Along with this you get a bit of a stick-it-to-the-man feeling as well. I will shed 0 tears if a bunch of people on reddit bring multiple hedge funds down. Perhaps the entire finance world should be more open, equitable and accessible!
2008 produced a lot of resentment of the heads-I-win, tails-you-lose financial arrangement (in terms of financial services companies) of the Western world, but there wasn't any attainable way of actually taking action based on that belief.
Now, there is. WSB gets to have its lulz, specifically at the expense of those they feel wronged them (banks, traders, etc).
As the saying went in Eve Online from Goonswarm, it doesn't matter if you lose 1,000 ships, if everyone wants to hang out with you instead of the other team. Cultural victory.
I imagine the first HFT firms felt very similarly.
WSB never had nihilistic worldview, there’s plenty of people supporting each other, there’s regular donations to charities, and etc.
WSB is just a tongue-in-cheek ridicule of the finance world, that’s it. Attempts to see some specific class of people lurking there is just not true at all and mostly people project their views on the finance world onto WSB as well while it’s a completely different thing.