It massively reduces the available torrent pools. That's not a niche thing. Also many trackers use udp.

I'm thinking of moving to protonvpn.

The Torrent uTP protocol (UDP) has hole-punching.

There is an issue for torrents with so few peers that no one is connectable, and therefore there is no one to hole-punch for everyone else.

VPN users are either super nerds or Joe Average mandated by company policy.

A lot of normal people have used VPN’s for years now to get around geolocks on streaming content.

Fuck, even some technically illiterate people I know do this to watch various shows.

Every VPN I know is blocked by every geolocked platform I know. The IP geolocation APIs return a code indicating the IP is a VPN exit.

Internet censorship is the norm in large parts of the world, and VPNs are used by pretty much everyone I know, technically proficient or not.

I still see tons of NordVPN sponsorship messages on youtube. I wonder if they've managed to pick up any good amount of regular people users or not. They sure do seem to be trying.

Pretty much every non-techy person I know under the age of about 50 uses VPNs for accessing regionally restricted streaming TV and sports[0] content, and getting around geoblocks (on US news sites that won't serve to Europe due to GDPR, trading/gambling sites, etc.).

I am pretty sure the sheer quantity of VPN ads on YT are also good evidence that they work and people are signing up. It wouldn't make sense to scale up a marketing approach to those levels unless earlier, smaller campaigns had positive returns.

[0] It's worth calling out explicitly the crazy lengths people will go to to both (a) find a free stream of a sports match; and (b) find a way to watch a match when they're travelling and can't access whatever service they usually watch it on.

I like NordVPN still. If there's any reason I shouldn't I'm all ears but haven't had an issue so far. I travel a lot and I definitely do feel better having my traffic routed through a VPN vs opening it up to whatever random entity happens to control the wifi I'm connected to, despite all the issues with them

I have nothing against NordVPN. I just generally agree with the statement that VPN users are either nerds or employees of companies that mandate it. But at the same time, I see Nord aggressively advertising to the general population - genuinely curious how successful that might be.