Yes, it can be a tar pit of trolls and Not Safe For Work posts, but if you arrange your settings to filter out the garbage, it’s also an amazing community.

Example 1:

1. User /u/thespite posts a clever way to send a holiday greeting using Google Maps. You can try the Holiday Message yourself.
2. User /u/benlaor tries it, and discovers a picture of his beloved dog of blessed memory. He wrote: “Thank you, thank you, thank you for this. You don’t understand what happened because of this video.I have never looked at my house on street view before (strange, huh?). This was the first time. The images for Israel are a few years old, probably around 5 years in most cases.

   At the end of the video it lets you just look around freely. I look around my house, look over at my parking stop, and there he was. Lazying about in the sun was my plump little fatass of a dog, who was my favorite thing in the world until he died a few years ago. I have almost no pictures of him due to my not backing anything up and my HDD being destroyed in a power surge.”

3. User /u/jangoo identifies the location.
4. User /u/thespite extracts a high-res image
5. User /u/fatty_tines creates a lovely color drawing of the dog.
   
6. Tears all around.

Example 2:

1. User /u/LE_POOR_MERIT has a teenaged son who does an awesome drawing entitled “Who Dares Summon Chrismotron?”
   
   ©2014 “Unknown ben LE_POOR_MERIT”
2. User /u/pohjankonna, a freelance artist from Finland, does an amazing digital rendering of the drawing
   
   ©2014 Pekka Veikkolainen
   and makes this offer: “You have of course the permission to print & frame it, after all I took the original without asking first! I do have a slightly larger version that I can send you. Better yet, I could also send you the original Photoshop file with all the different layers on it, if your son would be interested in deconstructing the painting to see what it’s actually made of (kind of a step-by-step view to creating a digital painting).”
3. Tears all around.
4. For those interested, a wallpaper version.

Keep in mind these people don’t know each other from Adam’s off ox. They’re just regular people being awesome to one another for no good reason, which is what the best of humanity is all about. Also, these are only two recent examples; similar things happen all the time on reddit. It always lifts my spirits to read about one.

The Old Wolf has spoken.