That may be because there aren't troll bots, stoking the fires, to drum up 'discussion' which makes it look good to advertisers that it is an active pool of users.

Did no one see the all the bots around 2015/2016 learning on Reddit?

They would say all sorts of non-sensical stuff as they learned, until there would be a hit or two that would get responses out of people, and it would re-enforce the bot to say more things like that.

Guess what kind of stuff/topics gets a plethora of responses?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Yeah that, but also the humans there too were a bit much. The entire culture is like "entertain me, while I shit on your efforts to do so". People (don't) wait to speak rather than actually listen.

Here we are allowed to have an older crowd of people - who use Linux btw - and do more to step up to be the change that they want to see in the world rather than merely vent like children.

I definitely would have left Reddit regardless of whether Lemmy existed to come to or not, so I get why so many content creators left Reddit - it just became not fun anymore. (And yeah, the chasing after profits is what originally made it that way, but also the sheeple consented too.)