I feel like though Reddit has experienced a huge growth in traffic, there are still so many barriers to entry, to use your nice phrase, that the user growth rate over the past, let’s say, ten years, is a significantly flatter curve vs the growth in the avg amount of content per user.

So new users are added slowly and most users probably post/browse very little, but a concentration of users post/browse a shit ton, bringing up the avg activity per user. I know they are very different metrics to compare, but i feel like this is why most people think of Redditors as “niche”. At least, that’s my impression of what major media outlets consider us to be.