The discussions on Reddit also were so cliche, and low-effort comments were rising to the top (chain threads). It has gotten worse since.

I'm also hoping discussions are more honest here, where facts and science is used, whereas on Reddit, my biggest issue was it got to the point, that evidence wasn't important in a discussion (but I've already noticed the same in some Lemmy communities. Literally had a discussion with someone recently whose argument revolved around insulting everyone they disagreed with, and they had all the insulting buzzwords to support their argument)

Thats actually the beauty of the ability to defederate from crappy communities here on Lemmy too, we can avoid toxic servers, and we can produce high quality discussion.

I think ultimately though, we don't have to be as popular. Quality, not quantity is important.

That being said though, anyone who moved to Reddit from Digg, knows how quickly things can change. I suspect popularity here is ultimately growing though. But not hopefully at the expense of quality. If Truth Social gets shut down, unfortunately, I suspect that will lead to growth of lemmy, but things will turn to crap :(