It’s routine for even relatively unsuccessful posts and comments to get 1000+ views. Imagine that many people huddled around you in the real world hearing your take on the Reddit API changes or looking at the dumb meme you made in 5 minutes. That would be something, wouldn’t it? For some reason we don’t think it is just because it’s happening on the internet.
Human brains are really, really bad at multiplying. This means we can’t really imagine a 1000 of something, so the sheer scale is difficult to perceive intuitively. That might be part of the reason, I think.