> The script collected around a million comments made to around 3,750 posts. Batchelor proceeded to clean the collection by removing posts that had less than 5 and more than 499 words. He also took care that there not be more than 5 comments from a single commenter in the collection for the study. The final collection of comments consisted of 177,296 comments made across 3 years, a total of around 7.75 million words in length.

5 comments over a 3 year period. In short, people who occasionally visit this sub, stumbled across it once or luckers. This isn't an analysis of the sub, but of the average person to interact with the sub.

That's like saying universities are dumb because most people entering the campus are undergrads and visitors.

To be fair, they did mention that a lot of complaints on the subreddit are about how sample populations are selected so I guess this comment is meta