Ask HN: Has Reddit started inflating their numbers?

I am a pretty addicted reddit browser and I frequently visit r/popular and other "big" subreddits. Lately I have started noticing that couple of hours old posts have now thousands of upvotes and comments, each comment having thousands of upvotes too. Before that you could see such numbers only on very big topics like major global news or tragedies. Are there any tools to track these metrics via 3rd party to see if they started artificially inflating theirs user numbers before their IPO?