Basic was previously provided by an external service called pushshift, which was free to use and allowed searching individual comments.

Right exactly. It easily works as an external toy project, now throw a hundred million people at it.

I understand your point, but scale also applies to reddits resources and number of developers / options, so I disagree with this reasoning/excuse.

You might be surprised at how small the Reddit team is

They keep raising money. Might as well hire more and pay better. I'm blown away that after nearly 2 decades, search is effectively unfunded at this company.

> Might as well hire more and pay better

Would you want to work there? I suspect a lot of great candidates want nothing to do with that company.

If they paid competitively, yes.

Scale isn't a linear kind of problem though. The complexity, if not carefully managed, in my experience grows faster than linearly.

I always see Salesforce as a huge company with tons of resources whose products struggle frequently.

This is what Reddit did. Just because you can throw developers and resources at a problem, does not make that problem basic.