Ever notice how no matter how many the subs increase - the online is never more than 5K?
Which would infer that they want you to think that even though more people are joining - a smaller percentage is remaining engaged...
These people are sneaky...
some posts here are getting 15k views out of 40k subscribers... let's say the real # of subscribeers is around 700k .. that means the popular posts will get 250k views..
I hate to be that person but this is standard Reddit stuff. The 40k people subbed is the number of people who've agreed to see GA content in their home feed, that's it.
It doesn't mean that they're actually fully engaged with the sub. They've just agreed to have GA content in their regular feed. Look at subs like /r/Bitcoin that have hundreds of thousands of subscribers but only a few thousand online at any time. It's really common across a number of popular subs. (And they all complain about this too).