General Discussion

I think there are a couple of reasons why people read way more than Rec. First, Reccing simply isn't as essential on DU as it is on other sites which allow up-voting and down-voting. We do have the Greatest page, but our more active page is the Latest page, and that simply lists threads in chronological order. On that page, threads which receive multiples of 25 replies are kicked back to the top, because overall we value replies more than we do Recs -- this is a discussion forum; we want people to discuss things.

I think you would see more Recs overall if we allowed down-voting. With down-votes in play, people would feel more urgency to vote for threads that they liked, because they would know that other people could make those threads go away if they didn't act. I do Rec things from time to time, but I'll often look at the top threads on the Greatest page and feel like, well, they're already up there, they don't need a Rec from me. In other words, there's less incentive to Rec on DU than there is on a site like Reddit.

Finally, the view counter counts views by all visitors, but you can only Rec something if you are signed in. So you'll likely see significantly more views than Recs because many, many people read DU but do not have an account.

DU is an old-school pre-Reddit discussion forum so we've always valued replies more than Recs. That's why things like Milestones are based on replies and not Recs, or why we display people's post counts but not their total Rec counts (although thinking about it, total Rec counts might actually be pretty cool to have).