Volume.
On Reddit I browsed “new” or “rising” and just subs I was subscribed too was enough for a steady stream of content.
On Lemmy even including all instances, there’s not a whole lot on “new”.
Which is good, because it makes it easier to find communities to subscribe too and also the problematic ones so you can block them and never see them again.
But low users mean most communities are dead. There’s a Fantasy Football sub for example, there’s 3 other people on it tho, so it won’t really be very useful this season.
It’s gaming an algorithm.
Big deals like this aren’t made off one person’s decision, there’s all these metrics that are supposed to show the health of a company. But like anything, if you know the metrics you can just focus on that even if it’s the literal worst thing to do. It pumps the metrics.
They’re not trying to keep reddit alive forever, they want to juice the metrics so it’s worth the absolute most on IPO day. It’s all they care about.