Sounds like a case of similar to safety systems at a nuclear plant. Not pressing until it is REALLY PRESSING! Its the usual dilemma, investing time/moey on something that most likely wont be needed versus adding that cool feature all the users will immediately see the benefit of. In a competitive environment, it isn't difficult to understand how they ended up on one vendor.

If a nuclear plant has problems, it can kill a lot of people, and wreck the lives of many others.

If reddit has problems, I suppose the worst that can happen is a cloud of toxic and poorly thought out comments is released on the internet.

So the tradeoffs they've made, in saving some money, are probably sensible.

> If reddit has problems, I suppose the worst that can happen is a cloud of toxic and poorly thought out comments is released on the internet.

Actually, that's what happens when reddit is working :)

Well, depending on prevailing conditions, they might be more widely dispersed rather than contained within the special "echo chamber" that reddit has built for that purpose.