"This was a product decision. Currently view counts are purely cosmetic, but we did not want to rule out the possibility of them being used in ranking in the future. As such, building in some degree of abuse protection made sense (e.g. someone can't just sit on a page refreshing to make the view number go up). I am fully expecting us to tweak this time window (and the duplication heuristics in general) in future, especially as the way that users interact with content will change as Reddit evolves."
Because it's more valuable of a data point to those who care about overall audience and reach. Someone visiting repeatedly might be evidence of an engaged user, but things like ads would have diminishing returns.
"This was a product decision. Currently view counts are purely cosmetic, but we did not want to rule out the possibility of them being used in ranking in the future. As such, building in some degree of abuse protection made sense (e.g. someone can't just sit on a page refreshing to make the view number go up). I am fully expecting us to tweak this time window (and the duplication heuristics in general) in future, especially as the way that users interact with content will change as Reddit evolves."
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6da6n9/comment...