Unfortunately, you can't equate resource usage to number of users.
500 users will use more than 5 times the resources of 100 users, because activity feeds on activity. But it gets worse than being non-linear.
If you judge you're using as many resources as you comfortably can at 500 users and close registrations, you will soon exceed your resource capacity anyway. Why? Because users who register elsewhere will increase your federation activity and therefore resource requirements.
Sure, image/video is vastly more resource-intense, but it's not used for successful DDoS attacks and fiber connections don't stop them either. We need a better answer for horizontal scaling as servers currently aren't even closing registrations until they're already noticing performance issues and are vulnerable to relatively small increases in federated activity.
Closing registrations is all well and good, but can't activity / load still skyrocket as users from federated instances subscribe to, comment on, and post to their communities?
Are we defining failure by their standards, or ours?
When my favorite communities were wrecked by being moved to front page, default-for-new-users and flooded with low effort content that may as well have been bot spam, it failed me.
When they made an API policy that ostensibly allowed profitability (despite charging far beyond what they might make from ads on the official mobile app) and avoided training by AI (despite refusing to grandfather in known 3PA and offering to approve new ones), it failed me again.
If I'm soon unable to access the site via the old.reddit interface to avoid intrusive ads, it will fail me yet again.
I won't be surprised if others add more failures to this list.
Maybe reddit makes money hand-over-fist from these changes without me, you, nsfw content creators, licensing / API fees from all current popular 3PA apps, and whoever else. I'm not eager to characterize this as success because VC's get their money back.
Take the Lions as in beat overall record? Preseason? I mean, if it happens in the Super Bowl I won't even be mad ✊
The reg season game last year felt sealed around the time James Houston got that nasty sack on Lawrence. Nasty as in the move he made for the sack itself was incredible, and honestly the result to Lawrence was nasty in a bad way even if the actual tackle/hit was clean. (obligatory: hard to believe we found Houston in the 6th round and he twice the sacks in 5 starts than Thibodeaux all season)
There are sorts by hot and top, yes. I don't know the details of voting and/or replies that score comment order.
We waited for our images to load one line at a time and we were grateful, dammit!
There are actually some legit anti-spam reasons that reddit has been obfuscating vote counts and totals for a long time now. Even if this wasn't a known phenomenon, I don't think I'd trust the API call results anyway.
There's no accumulated karma score though. People should be less sensitive about downvotes and I'm hoping it will mitigate low effort karma-seeking content, at least somewhat.
Pffffft maybe you, but I don't have cognitive biases! Anchor pricing doesn't work on me either because, raises nose, I know all about it.
Reddit is already ashes of what it once was.
I think reddit peaked around the time it started changing which subs were front page (8-10 years ago now?). One place I was very active at the time moved from being a medium size, great community to being overwhelmed by people who had no sincere interest in the topic but were happy to karma removed.
The sub became larger than ever by capitalizing on the community that built it but its value about its topic evaporated. Reddit has been making similar moves ever since. Karma-removed dominates pretty much every non-niche sub now.
*The removed that caught the filter refers to the act of getting something in exchange for performing an act eyeroll
The instance a user joins is quite important. An instance that doesn't want to store images and video will not want users who subscribe to all the image/video communities (that will federate their content over). A user whose interests are overwhelmingly technical won't be interested in local communities on an artist server, where a non-technical user might feel at home. Many instance moderation policies are friendly to right-wing and will be defederated by mainstream instances. And then there are loli/shota/koda instances...