Reddit was great because there wasn't really any benefit to getting "popular" on the platform
Strongly disagree. The whole Karma / award / Gold system combined with algorithms ensures a certain type of posts are favored, and comments / discourse of certain type gets upvotes and visibility. There is a pattern under the most popular Reddit posts and comments and it's not hard to see.
Lemmy has sort of a half-hearted voting system which I feel is actually beneficial to the experience and the fact there is no algorithm messing about is another big plus.