Nah, no way on average an article gets 166 comments. That must be page views or something.
Why not? Most front page posts have several thousand posts, which seems like it might be enough to offset the 0 comments that most submissions will get.
So what are we talking about, 1% of 12 million articles gets a few thousand comments?
The front page is obviously not representative in any way of 99% of the posts made on the platform. Look at the slew of posts made on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/all/new/