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.
We can still find engagement in small niche subs on Reddit. We've known, for many years, that people were going to move away from large corporate-controlled sites such as Reddit, Twitter etc..
The Fediverse is addressing this. It isn't a panacea. However, it is a re-imagining of what we want the Internet to be.
There are many others, that will come along after us, to address this further.
What will stop bots from coming here? Registration filters and user reports?
Bots are already proliferating the fediverse. Kbin is constantly spammed with "buy online drugs here" links. Transparent bots (those that are tagged as bots) try to boost engagement by reposting things from Reddit, but are still perpetuating one of the worst aspects of reddit even if they're being upfront about it. AI generated articles posted on obvious junk websites are constantly being spammed by the same accounts.
It's a difficult problem to solve.
Got examples? I've never seen this once as a Kbin user.
They come up every few weeks, usually admins ban them quickly
Here's one: https://kbin.social/m/random/t/1060795 I always see them popping up under random@kbin.social
Yeah, I see a ton of this under random.
Here's my front page at this very moment: https://i.imgur.com/4IsJ68f.png