We can make this a great interesting place and more people will join
part of it may be that reddit has become so big it’s almost like shouting into the void.
Once a post has >300 comments, the only way to have a meaningful conversation is to add to the top-level comments. And soon the top-level comments are all nested with relevant and irrelevant comments.
that’s the thing - not all new comments are high-quality either.
There’s a balance between new and popular (so number of upvotes over time for example). But the problem is that you need to constantly change the scale with your userbase. For a site with 10,000 users, (number of upvotes / number of hours post was created) may work, but a site with 1 million users may need to use a factor of 10, a site with 100 million users may need a log scale, etc.
