Maybe they are? The question is, what am I doing differently in this universe compared to the universe where the canary is still present? It seems like your answer is "In this universe (canary removed) I no longer treat reddit as a secure and private communication platform." My personal threat model assumes that reddit is not a secure and private communication platform so the status of the canary does not change my behavior, utility schedules, outlook, etc.

I personally would not be doing anything differently but that is besides the point... they should not be able to get that data without a warrant. So I guess the value of it would be that you are now aware of something else that the government is doing that they should not be doing...

I apologize if I am missing something in your answer but "NSLs are bad, mmkay?" does not seem to be very responsive. We knew about NSLs before warrant canaries. If that is the only utility they provide it seems like they are not very useful to me.

I wish that they would be more specific in their canary and perhaps have multiple ones... for examples:

1. we were not asked to provide private post

2. we were not asked to provide metadata like IP addresses

3. we were not asked to backdoor our website

4. we were not asked to shadowban users

5. maybe even one canary per user, to know exactly who is affected

I entirely agree. It's foolish to believe that "private subreddits" and "private messages" are private, in any meaningful sense.

I don't think information needs to be immediately actionable to be useful.