Yep. IMO, the experience of using social media was pretty good (far from perfect but pretty good) going into 2014, but 2014 set in motion what became 2015. When gamergate-style ""debate"" tactics took over well, everything.
EDIT: And more importantly those tactics weren't banned by most subreddits
Lemmy is just software that anyone can use. Each Lemmy instance with open sign ups has their own rules. But even so- there would be no way of knowing which Lemmy users are equivalent to any reddit user without the user itself making it known.