Funny I never use the front-page and visit sub individually. I had never considered that I may be abnormal in this regard. Damn now I want to see metrics on this...
My gut tells me that part of the reason why Reddit was a flop is AdBlock. I would not be surprises is much of r/programming ran it. These guys are tech savy without necessarily being in the start-up scene.
Numbers that low could be attributed to miss-clicks, users who thought it was an r/programming post.
What I don't understand is that these phones don't seem to be aimed at inmates. As other people have pointed out small phones have been around for a while, their size hasn't proved useful to smugglers. Furthermore the particular phones under attack here a designed to look like a car key. Which if I imagine is just as contraband as a phone is.
Seems like the government is attacking these phones under false pretences, which is what really worries me here.