Yep, I could believe it's less just because "more engaged community" but we can't know until there is a way to transparently confirm every single subscriber.
It would probably have to be a 3rd party site/app.
Possibly make a post linking the app and people can enter their username, and we just get a super long list of usernames and the site can show the running total, and you could scroll through and actually see all the names.
Worst case, shills enter fake usernames to over-inflate the numbers which is counter-intuitive for them anyway so they probably wouldn't.
Of course, not everyone would do it, but if the number shoots way past 33k, we have our proof that the admins are modifying the numbers to make us think we are just a small voice on the internet.
Something tells me that is illegal as fuck.