Reddit is adding new real-time features, including a live upvote count

The increase in processing and networking needed to achieve these neutral-at-best features...why? It's either adding socket connections or polling to every client. It's also not like they can push the same update to every user, because people's front pages are completely different.

In regards to processing, I think I read that Reddit recomputes "materialized views" (or equivalent) on every write. With their old setup, they certainly didn't have to. Nobody would care if the upvote count updated every few minutes. Well now they've condemned themselves to have to update them every few seconds. They also have to add all of the fuzzing they already do in order to combat bots.

I wonder if this will make their very slow mobile website even slower. Perhaps one day they will match the performance of old.reddit.com.