*hands* On the other side of the anecdata spectrum, I replied to all my comments, got replies back both from the authors of my gifts and from a couple of my recipients (multiple replies, in a couple cases), and also received quite a few replies to other comments I left (because I actually managed to leave a reasonable amount of comments for others this year, yay). So it's hard for me to gauge whether replies overall are down, because I gave a bunch and got a bunch.