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.
You’re right, that’s something I hadn’t considered. The desire to keep gaining more karma definitely plays a factor in reddit content, people know what will get a reaction, or the type of stories youtube channels will pick up, or what will simply get an upvote and just set out to create as much of that content as possible. And then they post that one post to 38 barely relevant subs so I see it multiple times and it’s just a cesspool honestly.