Personally, I look at it quite often while I'm waiting for RES¹ to load a new page of content. But I assume RES wasn't used in this test.

¹ Reddit Enhancement Suite (http://reddit.honestbleeps.com/)

Agreed... the RES 'loading next page' cog icon is directly above the 'reddit tools' footer in my setup, and I'm guessing it's above the 'help' for people with smaller monitors, and above the 'about us' for those with larger monitors.

I'm finding this fascinating.

I find it helpful to see the list of mods in a given subreddit. Also, that's where the "Submit Link" button shows up on all but the front page.

Maybe that correlates to experienced users often quoting community rules to the newbies that are breaking them.

Community rules? The only rule quoted on reddit is rule 34 and it should be hardly a problem quoting it.

The reddiquette: http://www.reddit.com/help/reddiquette

Old timers tend to know it better than the new folks, mainly since it's hardly ever referenced anymore, but it's the guidelines for how to interact on the site.