On Reddit I generally didn’t read attached articles. I’d developed a pretty good intuition where the article title, website and top comments could tell me all I needed to know (And reading the source normally confirmed this)
On Lemmy the smaller numbers of comments mean we need to engage with the content being discussed more directly, which is quite a nice change of pace for us Reddit converts.
Another thing about the lower population is that you don’t have people trying to needlessly karma farm. All those addicts couldn’t leave behind their treasures trove of 1 million updoots, so they stayed on reddit.
Because of that, you have many more people here posting about stuff they’re passionate about. No rage-bait articles or massive amounts of doomerism posts. It’s refreshing to have more organic content being shared.
I guess that the other thing that helps is that we don’t have Karma over here, so there’s nothing of value to gain.