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.
I think this disparity in votes and comments is also hugely affected by how the UI has been changing over the years as well as the destruction of third party apps. The site is now designed in a way where active participation is less encouraged than ever before unless you’re running old reddit on a traditional computer with an ad blocker.
Yeah I think this is spot on. Someone else mentioned that Reddit doesn't really want you spend lots of time (yet anyway, till they can roll out better their new Dynamic Product Ads) on a single post. It would rather you scroll upvote and move on so they can try to get as much of the feed to your eyeballs as possible.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/reddit-sneaky-ai-spam-bots-compete-to-sell-you-stuff/