I half-agree with this. I think that this depends a lot on the topic and, while the smaller amount of comments does hurt discussion depth, the individual comments themselves partially offset this by being more thoughtful.
And, while anecdotal, I think that there’s a considerably lower ratio of comments with negative discussion value here in Lemmy than in Reddit. I’m not even talking about the out-of-place jokes (although they add noise), but shit like this:
- “waaah, TL;DR!!” discouraging in-depth explainations
- feigned lack of understanding as ad nauseam tactic
- context illiteracy
- unchecked assumptions towards other users, for the sake of ad hominem
- “trust me”
Don’t get me wrong; you do find this crap here, but IMO it’s way less than in Reddit. And they hurt discussion because they either waste the time of the more thoughtful and knowledgeable users, or outright disengage them.