We have less people, We have a better signal to noise ratio. So far we seem to have been spared the idiot community rules, like the moderators of r/music telling you that you need to go to tip of my tongue to crowdsource a list of songs with a certain theme, well they only accept a very narrow genre of music. Upvotes and down votes don’t absolutely sink or blow up a post, you can say something relatively controversial here and not have it get buried.

We have some discoverability problems that they’re working on. We’re lacking a lot of niche interests. You’re not going to find a sub here for every trade and game that exists. A significant amount of our traffic is just posts from other places with a minimum amount of discussion.
Upvotes and down votes aren’t magically universal across every node. Some of the smaller fringe nodes can end up with delays and receiving posts.

I stopped reading Reddit At the very beginning of the API wars. It’s honestly so much more healthy here.