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.
Digg is basically credited as being the catalyst for Reddit, giving it its initial strong launch and overall growth trajectory. Reddit was a place for nerds. As it grew and started hitting mainstream, that changed. But without the users from Digg, Reddit would have likely been as popular as Twitter at the start, a platform that has historically struggled to be relevant. At it's inception, I think only about 10% of new account holders would remain on the platform. Maybe even lower. That's a stark contrast from say Facebook that had something like a 90% to 95% retention rate.