Far as I remember, this used to be the online side of the secret shop for The International (Dota 2), then generalized a bit to sell Portal t-shirts and whatever. The company that actually ran it changed hands & names a couple times until Goodsmile bought it, and I doubt Valve care too much to find another vendor at this point.
Terry Gilliam's Brazil always does it for me. Depends heavily on which version you watch though, they're polarizing enough that you can play emotional Russian roulette with both versions.
Yeah, they "went legit" years ago and have licensing deals with a lot of music publishers now.
Beneficial yes, practical no.
Beneficial because Reddit captured a ton of niche communities that used to exist on forums/usenet/etc, and there's a lot of actual unique, useful content buried under all the noise. Ideally that content would be able to filter back into places that aren't tied to some startup that never figured out how to be profitable.
Impractical because I imagine quite a few servers would have to defederate because they simply wouldn't be able to manage mirroring the constant stream of stuff coming out of Reddit. It's a bit early to tell how long any of the general interest reddit-a-likes can sustain on donations or whatever, and turning on that firehose would transform some hobbyist servers into money pits fast.
Here's a positive: cigarettes make a great mosquito repellent, because nicotine is a natural insecticide and the smoke/odor repels them. It also repels girlfriends and other humans, but still.