Just a few years ago, you would never see such a disparity in votes vs comments. But these days, this is pretty much the norm. I've seen posts with 10K+ upvotes and no more than 80 comments.
I'd say in about 2 years, the entire place is going to be bots with AI generated content that try to mimic "real users" using their new Dynamic Product Ads tool. Not sure how that's legal as I thought ads needed to be marked or differentiated from regular content, but here we are.
The future looks bleak and AI even bleaker. Because it's going to be used against us to make the rich richer and not to make our lives better.
TBH, smaller communities with more engagement is better IMO. If you don't get in early there's no chance to do more than passively comment and get no reply. If I'm going to engage in conversation I'd like at least a little back and forth. Where the lack of volume really is felt is in niche subjects
Dunno where I'm going with this, but your point is valid. I just kinda like the small web feel. Reminds me of early Internet days
Regardless of post type, there has been a fairly reliable trend of 100 votes per comment. You'd expect that post (3.9k up votes) to have roughly 390 comments. This had been the rule for Reddit site-wide for a decade, and applied to other sites too.