Assess methodology for modern privcount Tor user counts
With our traditional user count methods, based on extrapolating from consensus fetch counts -- and assuming each client is online all day -- we see approximately 2 million daily users.
The IMC 2018 paper estimates closer to 8 million daily users: https://www.ohmygodel.com/publications/tor-usage-imc18.pdf
Understanding how many users we have is a critical building block for Isabela's "user retention" cycle. It also turns out to really impact how other large organizations view us: from Mozilla's perspective, 8 million daily users is wildly more attractive than 2 million daily users, and similarly with larger numbers we're in a position to negotiate funding for a spot in the search box. And third, understanding our user base helps us understand the capacity of the Tor network, by making us better able to predict how Tor would handle an influx of n million new users (from Brave, from Firefox private browsing mode, or from other apps that integrate Tor and then become popular).
We should figure out what we think about this paper's counting methodology, and either (1) identify follow-up research questions that we need to investigate to convince ourselves that this newer number is more right, or (2) decide that the methodology is solid, in which case we should (a) tell the world about it in a blog post or similar, (b) update our various documentation and metrics graphs, and (c) figure out a way to deploy ongoing user count measurements with this new approach.