[anamax]

No, software isn't bridges. When bridges fail, people die. When reddit crashes, people take a piss and pet the cat.

I don't know the relevant details about reddit but the assumption that the early reddit people could have easily built something more scalable yet there are tech reasons why the later people, with far more resources, can't.

As to the assumption that one knows the important bottlenecks 2-3 orders of magnitude in advance, that's just wrong.

"late answers are wrong answers" isn't just for real-time. That applies to products as well as signals.

Technical debt is not necessarily a bad thing.