[unimpressive]

>Oh, and the front page of Reddit is still a worse source of news than the front page of the NYT.

I would argue that Reddit is no longer a news site. Go compare the front page of Reddit to the front page of Digg. You'll instantly see the difference. My current hypothesis is that as a community becomes more insular the quality goes down. Though obviously if there is a theme for the discussion board then veering off topic is bad.

[vy8vWJlco]

Now compare both of those to the front page of HN. My current theory is that as the community becomes more popular, the technical content goes down and the social thought-pieces and popular references go up.

[nwzpaperman]

Reddit became just another aggregator. Flooded with legacy media content and meme photos with a pinch of porn and a junk commenting system. All of the peer generated content is lost in the sea of irrelevance.

[rdl]

Subreddits seem strongly resistant to this, but maybe that doesn't help the un-logged-in or new user.

I read r/gundeals, r/til, and r/iama. None of those have crappy external links. There are the obnoxious memes within comments, though.