This might just be me cherry picking or doing some other form of poor analysis, but sorting by Top - Last Month seems to bear out that the most popular post of the entire last month only got to a score of 3.4k, with average daily top posts being less than 1k, when it SEEMS like the average daily best is typically around that 3k mark.
Am I just imagining this, or is there something causing less engagement/enthusiasm going on? Mods, have you noticed something, or am I barking up a non-existent mangled metaphor?
I'm not sure anyone on the mod team has crunched these specific numbers, though we do collect this kind of data. These kinds of changes do happen and are generally due to shifts in Reddit's algorithms, which can have pretty profound implications for how visible a given post is likely to become and how long it stays visible. We have literally no control here - we can feed back to the admins on the impact, but there is no way they'll tell us any proprietary details behind changes and since we have a pretty distinctive set of wants when it comes to visibility (ie posts peaking at a point after there's been sufficient time for an answer to get written), we would not expect that they have any interest in adjusting site-wide mechanics to suit our specific needs.