99% of all online comments are generated by 1% of people.

ish

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

There's writing and writing though. Short throwaway comments and bickering on social media aren't really the same as writing long-form prose.

There are a lot of people not on Reddit or HN or Medium

(Also a lot of people whose terse and incoherent interactions and tendency to simply repost on Facebook and Twitter suggest that writing is a regrettably necessary means rather an end)

People really struggle writing simple essays. It takes a lot of work externalizing words from your own context inside your mind so that the sentences can be understood by themselves. It’s one of the reasons we used to teach “word problems” in our mathematics classes alongside composition, but now we just want to compute arbitrary answers.

I can write thousands of words if they're on a topic I'm thinking intensely about and need to write it down to sort out my thoughts.

But if anyone just throws me a random topic and ask me to write 2000 words on it, I'd tell them to go ___ yourself. (Yes, I hated writing essays in school...)

Just look at the ratio of lurkers to posters on any forum. Most people are read only.