> Quick Google searches reveal that Reddit has something between 0.5 and 1.5 billion monthly users
Not disagree-ing with your points, but do you have a source for this? It doesn't pass the sniff test to me.
1.5B people is ~ 20% of the world population, and probably closer to 50% of those with computers & internet capable of downloading reddit.com, an image heavy forum.
I'm in the demographic for Reddit (30s, male, western country), and I think maybe 10% of my friends, family & coworkers even know what Reddit is, let along are an MAU.
Everybody's reporting "Reddit had 430 million monthly active users in 2020", so that's the half-billion that seems to be fact-based.
Then the current 1.5B number seems to be based on extrapolation (1.66B in [1] for one estimate) based on previous growth rates.
I shared your initial skepticism, but Reddit is the 20th most popular site in the world [2]. I know I have definitely been surprised and even shocked that certain extended family members and coworkers of mine have turned out to be heavy Reddit users. It's turned into this incredibly widespread site that almost nobody talks about "in real life".
Of course, monthly active users presumably includes people who click on a Reddit search result once in the month. It doesn't mean they're using it daily and upvoting.
I highly doubt Reddit has 1.5B monthly users, otherwise they would have reported it in the media. Very few companies have the execution capabilities to reach 1B+ users
If you have the physical hardware, there will be people able to produce their own firmware that disables built in filtering, or at least, disables the internet connecting that reports said filtering. You'll have a server that is disconnected from the internet with all your DRM free content.
They would have to outlaw personal computing, and not allow you to build your own servers with no firmware-enforced filtering, which given the current direction, is not particularly farfetched, but at that point battle is lost anyway and your DVD rips are the least of your problems.
RoHS and lead-free solder insures that the relatively open hardware we have today won’t function in the future, post-personal computing being outlawed. I don’t think it’s a vast conspiracy, but rather a happy accident.
That's true, but I think watching it and acting on it are very different things, just as in the case with other social media. For example, I subscribe to WSB, but I also don't do risky trades except with small amounts of "fun money", I have triple digit thousands invested in index funds.
Being a subscriber is not the same as being an active participant in the underlying behavior. I watch it mostly out of schadenfreude (which might mean I'm not a very nice person, but there it is).
Try and maintain that for as long as you can.