When you're watching a stream on YouTube or Twitch, do you participate in chat?

I've been watching a lot of streams lately and noticing that a lot of people don't participate in chat. You have a a stream of like a 1 or 2 thousand and 20 or 30 people constantly chatting. Maybe 50 max. Even weirder to me is that it seems like there are a decent bit less who actually try to communicate directly towards the creator unless they're part of the "in" group. Besides situations where the streamer will ask chat questions or have a conversation with chat atleast, but there still aren't that many relative to how many people are actually there even in those cases.

Is it normal to just watch a live stream and just lurk in the chat or something? To just completely ignore it even? That just seems to go against the point of it to me.