I'm really not sure if I can attribute Hanlon's razor to this. When you log in, that's by definition hitting the database, and should return your settings. Place that in a cookie/localstorage and it should still know your settings offline.

There is no single database at the scale reddit operates.

My bad, *a database.

I'm pretty sure I saw in an AMA that Reddit has an Accounts database (maybe split further by sharding) which I'd assume holds your settings as well.

But I rescind my point; it could very well be attributed to database infrastructure issues, whether that's hitting a shard with stale data, or splitting account settings to its own DB that it can't access when you log in.

at this point they should have those setting at an equilibrium