I, personally, find these threads quite useful. They're useful in that they specifically relate to questions about the game, not the intricacies of mods, or any of the other things people post on this whole forum for. So, if I have a question about something like honour rating and how to increase it, I can simply search this thread for that, knowing that if I do I won't find what I did before I posted here, a bunch of mod threads that have the word 'honour' in it..
As for other games, Dwarf Fortress has one that was 60ish pages - not posts - last I checked (a while ago), and I find it useful to peruse because sometimes people ask questions I wouldn't have thought of asking.
And on top of all that, it means that people asking silly/pointless questions (but ignorant of its silliness) will ask it here, instead of having 30 threads asking how to find companions. It's a win-win and if you don't like it, don't read it - it's one thread rather than dozens.