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 was Reddit, before Reddit came along. And then they tried to monetise it all and pushed out a site layout update that "enhanced" that monetisation aspect (sound familiar?)
Basically they fucked it up right there.
I left Digg in 2010 and never went back, and now the domain and it's remnants are owned by some advertising company.
Was there an exodus in waves? Did some people stay behind, but fewer and fewer as time passed?