Your first part about references was one of the things I disliked the most about Reddit where someone would make a pop culture reference and it would spiral into.a comment chain of just quotes with no originality, I'm glad that hasn't caught on in Lemmy.
My second least favourite thing, US defaultism, is alive and well on Lemmy unfortunately. On Reddit you would be told it's an American website and to deal with it, well this is the fediverse and I don't want to deal with it. Just say where you are from or what country news are about, it's not much to ask.
If they actually paid their taxes instead of using loopholes it would amount to a lot more than 1%