I'm wondering if it's the lurkers. Based on personal experience: I enjoyed Reddit from the sidelines for years--never made an account. Switch to Lemmy and few users means no conversation, so I figured I'd jump in. But it turns out I'm a pretty boring, literal, mild-mannered commenter. Nice, but no zing. I'm still kind of waiting for the banter.
A lot of the comments/ jokes were just recycled forced humour karma whoring, because people knew they’d get top content and a quadrillion upvotes for writing the same old shit over and over again
I feel this. It felt like anything I ever had to comment had been said a dozen times by the time I stumbled into a thread, so I rarely felt any need or desire to post on Reddit. Here, I almost feel obligated to, just to keep the threads going. Part of me is excited to see the activity keep picking up here, but part of me is enjoying actually feeling like my boring-ass comments are worth posting, and also knowing said lame comments aren't going to get heaped with random snark. Feels like the medium size forums I used to frequent back in the 00s and early 10s.
Good lord I can't imagine having had browsed reddit without an account. The default subs were always so awful/toxic. It was nice having a curated list of hobby subs and cat pics and such
That's how my husband did it, but he misses so much I don't know if it's culture but awareness? Eavesdropping? People watching? It was a lot of scrolling, but also a lot of things I wouldn't have heard of any other way