r/sports isn't as active as a lot of the major sports subreddits IMO. Any serious sports discussions would be on sport-specific subs.

r/nba

r/nfl

r/formula1

r/mma

Those are some major ones still private.

Quite disappointing that r/soccer decided to re-open though. Would've made a significant impact.

I can’t figure out r/sports’s moderation rules. Every now and then I will accidentally reply there because something bubbles up to my front page. I discovered 90% of my comments there get deleted without explanation.

The "major" subreddits you listed are ranked #74, #76, #77, #4020, #946, #165, #875, #2324, and #1584 by posts per day. The claim that they are "keeping reddit alive basically" is rather generous.

How can I see those stats?

Yeah that's where I took the stats from. I spot checked them a bit to see if that metric seemed like it was affected by the recent blackout, but it looked like it wasn't (maybe they lag by some number of days). You could take the #users instead which shouldn't be affected by the blackout, but I thought posts better reflected how much activity they were producing (the first couple listed were really low on users but much higher on posts), but really I think for any of the metrics you pick will make the "keeping reddit alive" claim look rather questionable.

Subreddit posts per day is really not a great metric to track engagement. You probably want comments or votes per day.

Isn't the rule of thumb 1/9/99 where 1% post, 9% comment, 99% lurk?

Or something like that.

r/politics won't go dark because the mods are paid to spam posts