Yeah this proves that old reddit wasn't peak design, the direction they were taking it in was just a bad one. Probably because it tried to discourage spending time in the comments sections, which IMO was the whole point of the site.

I wonder if they would be profitable if they had just included some non-intrusive text ads every 20 or 30 comments or so. Or add in code to detect when people are talking about a product and adding in an Amazon link to that product or something like that. The whole "ads must look like posts" thing was unnecessarily rigid, in hindsight.