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.
I agree… the vast amount of replies was at times distracting, and the comment section took on a life of it’s own that often had nothing to do with the link. I find myself reading more articles here, like it’s actually a link aggregator.