At the same time though, you'd imagine reddit has some sort of distributed backend so that getting direct access to the datastore and doing something like

At the same time though, you'd imagine reddit has some sort of distributed backend so that getting direct access to the datastore and doing something like UPDATE the_donald SET comment = replace('/u/spez', '/u/notspez', comment) WHERE 'fuck /u/spez' in lowercase(comment); would create massive consistency headaches.