You are right, my statement may be a bit misleading or incomplete. The ~500 readers are not just local rss bots, but they include aggregate RSS bots. For example, I see the feedly reporting ~200 subscribers, newsreader reporting 50 subscribers, feedbin, etc. Each of those only have between 1 to 3 ip addresses. So for each RSS bot, there are an arbitrary number of actual users reading. I can't track those accurately.

However, users can click on an RSS feed article and read it directly on my blog. These have a URL param that tells me they are coming from the feed. When an article isn't on HNs frontpage, the majority of traffic is coming from those feeds.

By the way, thank you for sharing this tool. Very insightful.