As one of those talent, I have to respectfully disagree. First of all, R/W to the database was solved pretty early on. We had queues many years ago for the writes and tons of read slaves for the reads. Also, the servers that serve comments and listings were not the same ones that took in votes and comments. It was most definitely a "throw servers at it" problem, with a few bottlenecks on caching that were solved as they came up.

The biggest issue was that we didn't have the budget (both money and manpower) to deal with scaling a global transaction system, which is just plain hard. Reddit gets almost as much traffic as eBay, but eBay has thousands of engineers and Reddit doesn't even have 100.

Back when I was there, the site worked well enough, there were only a few of us, and we spent about 50% of our time on spam and about 25% on community management. That didn't leave much time for scaling and performance. For context, we were serving a billion pages a month on a budget of $50K/mo.

Today they are making great progress in scalability because they finally have the budget to hire the people to make it great.

Reddit also gets it wrong. They blamed a completely unrelated person (who had killed himself) for the Boston bombing, which is now a meme ("We did it Reddit!"), and even today a photo of a black man in army camo and holding an M16 was falsely claimed to be a shooter.

That photo today was published by the Dallas PD, it wasn't a reddit thing.

https://twitter.com/DallasPD/status/751262719584575488/photo...

Besides, you're mixing up reddit the platform/company and reddit the commentariat.

> mixing up reddit the platform/company and reddit the commentariat

The sane way to use Reddit is to log in, unsubscribe from everything that's by default, and add only things you are very interested in. Also go into your Settings and turn off all the suggested subreddits (and the outbound click tracking, surely).

Do that, and you can browse your niche technology news and computer game and magical-girl-anime subreddits in peace -- otherwise it's just a losing fight against clickbait popularity contests and flash mobs for justice.

And do subscribe to /r/cats to get your daily dose of cat.

http://i.imgur.com/f1yeHVO.jpg

Absolutely it can be dangerous, such as the use of police scanners (which will often broadcast uncorroborated information).

Completely off-topic here

    > I think this is a talent problem and not a "throw servers at it" problem.

I don't see the point of your reply, since it doesn't counter or even remotely relate to anything I wrote. It certainly wasn't about whether humans or machines are there limiting factor.

"doesn't... even remotely relate"

You're both talking about servers and difficulties with them.

Yeah... if you use enough abstraction an apple is like an orange. I can't argue on that basis.