The actual problem stems, as so many problems do, from the transposition of two characters.

Indeed, by manipulating the query string, you can find a strange purgatory where damned submissions slowly rot, alone in the darkness. … These posts are sad, alone, and afraid. And notably, they are sorted oldest first, just as I predicted.

Maybe there is no moral. Reddit screwed up. It could have hurt them, but it didn’t, and probably won’t. They are wrong but they are not Wrong because there is no such thing as capital-W Wrong. Moral codes are ideas that we construct, and there is no god of determinism that will one day smite Reddit for their crime of being bad at math. The world is a flawed place, has always been a flawed place, will always be a flawed place.

via Reddit’s empire is founded on a flawed algorithm – Ian's Tech Notes.

Sigh.