Maybe. Thanks to subscribing (only) to economics, programming, ruby, science, and a handful of other subreddits, I'm seeing an awful lot more of the people I thought had departed. I've started 'adding them as friends' so that I can visually track the density of good commenters at a glance. It appears that modifying your subscriptions to avoid 'politics' and 'pics' increases that density substantially.

And, really, Metafilter isn't that great afterall. So I'm very happy that reddit did this. I was wondering whether normalization wasn't a good answer. Looks like it was. If I weren't working on my thesis I would apply to reddit. Hell, once I'm done with the revisions, I might just apply to telecommute as an 'intern' just to play with the data, if they'll let me. This sort of thing is always fun.