This is just my personal take on it: Way too much of reddit is thought-free, just kind of spending time making in-jokes, or posting charming or funny one-off pictures, just kind of farting around. That is a fine activity, but it's very far removed from what the potential could be of this type of communication network, and what the original goal of reddit was, back in the Aaron Swartz days.

I actually didn't really notice how far in that direction it had gone until I tried out Lemmy a few months ago, and I found it refreshingly free of the exact same types of vacuous content, and now I've been watching as all that stuff migrates onto Lemmy. I've been progressively unsubscribing from a lot of communities as the average worthwhileness of their posts progressively drops. I actually don't agree at all with the need to "win" by absorbing into Lemmy the user base of Reddit -- I think the goal is to have a high quality network where good discussion happens, which sometimes means more users, but more vitally should mean a good culture with worthwhile content.

This is just kind of a side note, but the other thing I've observed is that the "you're not allowed to say certain things" mentality of reddit is now here on Lemmy as well. I actually tried out having a couple of heated debates with some tankies in Lemmy tankie forums, early on, curious about whether I would get banned or anything. They downvoted and yelled at me to no end, but no one deleted anything or said I wasn't allowed to have my opinion. Twice in the last couple of days I've had some thread I'm participating in get deleted because mods found it to be a discussion that people weren't allowed to have.

I do think there's some valuable stuff on reddit, or basically anywhere -- people are great sometimes, and if you give them a place they can talk, sometimes they'll use it to say great stuff. But I do agree 100% with the reluctance to import reddit as it is and instead to try to make a distinct culture that's, for lack of a better word, better.