Why is Cardano so popular?

I'm always researching smart contract chains, in particular ALGO, EOS, Polkadot and Cardano. I'm trying to figure out why Cardano is so vastly popular compared to other coins.

For example, Cardano has a comparible market cap to Polkadot (DOT), but its subreddit has ~300k members vs Polkadots ~20k. It seems like they have almost equal market cap, and are at similar points in development (Cardano smart contracts vs Polkadot parachains). ADAs subreddit has about half of /r/ethereum which has been around forever and dwarfs the other two in market cap.

Not hating on ADA or DOT technology. I'm just trying to understand why one seemingly has an order of magnitude larger community when everything else seems roughly equal.