But how much of the fanbase will be alienated? Much of these people live and breathe on reddit. Not all of them but many of them.
Well, Linus has said himself that the majority of views are not from "fans".
The fact that LTT is known by many here gives an idea that LTT is a very well-known tech channels, which comes with a lot of random views.
This has been seen before, but Anthony has opened a door they can never close again.
The casual viewers likely don't know about Anthony being Emily, or if they don't know his name, definitely cannot imagine they should refer to him as "the girl/woman". They
will be harassed by LTT fans about using correct pronouns, etc.. I think casual viewers are more representative of the population than the reddit-fan crowd. Hence, waaay more people who don't take kindly to be told to call the ogre "SHE" or else they are Hitler. Also waaay more people who dgaf about "trans" stuff and find it just an annoying issue and definitely don't want to see politics when engaging with brainless youtube videos. In conclusion --> Less views.
You are right that the reddit fanbase are the cashcows, tho. So probably there won't be a huge drop in earnings from the store in the short term.
Long term? Less views means less new watchers and, hence, less new fans. The algorithm will do the job "for us"
This is only accounting for people being turned off by the acceptance!
Acceptance is inversely correlated with how many people you will piss off.
Unless Linus supports all the children transitioning stuff, which would piss off a lot more people than him giving lukewarm support to Emily (and blow this FAR beyond niche online communities - I'm including KF in this group). For the extreme people of reddit, the lukewarm support is the same as saying "kill all trannies".
There
will be people who leave because he is not enthusiastic enough about his support. These people will be
few but
very very loud. Again that catch-22, what do you then?
TLDR: people on either side will be pissed off. The smart thing is to never ever talk about this again. Just say it's a matter of an employee's private life so it's not for LTT to discuss and hold that line. Do you trust Linus to be that smart?