Liveblogger here. This post was best-effort liveblogged while the talk was going on, so this typo was my fault. I've fixed it to say "2B votes per month", which reflects what was on the speaker's slides.

Maybe 12M articles / self posts, 2B comments?

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.

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/

Most will be lucking to reach 10 comments.

So what are we talking about, 1% of 12 million articles gets a few thousand comments?

This is correct.

2B must be ”pageviews per month”?