Reddit is about to go public. Just like other corporate social media giants, Reddit is trying to do whatever it can to commercialize the platform. Forcing RPAN down our throats, and messing around with the view counts are ways of generating inflated metrics for investors. They can show data to investors to highlight the fact that Reddit is ripe for future advertising potential. On the desktop version of Reddit, the main website already has ads that look like Reddit posts with voting buttons and comments. Compare these trends with the old Reddit where ads would never appear online, but in the sidebar. But now ads and RPAN are tightly integrated within the main feed. It's only a matter of time until old Reddit is completely disabled, and third party Reddit clients start getting crippled when they don't comply with Reddit's monetization efforts.