I'm not familiar with the HN API, but is it possible/can someone come up with submitters:commenters:inactive accounts for say the past year to see if it comes out close to 1:9:90? Does the "1% rule" seem to apply to HN?
Any site that you find interesting likely has an element or structure that causes it to skew that pattern. Wikipedia doesn't follow that ratio, for example. Also the metrics around social media stuff are so bizarre (and so easily manipulated) that it's hard to get decent data. Trump's engagement metrics on Twitter are in the fractions of a percent. CEO posts on LinkedIn get a few hundred reads and four comments. So is that 100:1? Or is 400 reads versus a million followers the important ratio? It's all over the place and you can pluck whatever curve you want by selecting datasets and ignoring important outside influences such as LinkedIn's idiotic design or Trump's pacing of Tweets.
