the discussions were so much more organic

Yeah, that's one of the main reasons I really just lurked on reddit and never commented. For every post that showed up in top/hot sorting, I already knew what the top 10 comments would be before I even clicked. And it's not even like echo chamber type comments, but more just the same old reddit-isms that would get used over and over again. Like every "discussion" is basically a race to see who can be the first to say the thing, and somehow those comments always end up getting the most upvotes. I've already seen a few getting used here on Lemmy. Hopefully the community will learn to stop encouraging that kind of behavior.