Perhaps that is how Richard Stallman and Donald Knuth feel about the web, particulary the (un)social web. Who wants to voluntarily let their mind be invaded with idiotic comments like those you refer to on Reddit.
Me, for one.
So, for most of the past decade I've been involved in building online communities. I've been participating in them for longer than that. And I've seen the same pattern occur over and over again: as a community grows, the members become more and more concerned with what's appropriate and less and less concerned with whatever actually brought them together in the first place.
You can see this happening here, now, on a regular basis: "is this really appropriate for HN" is almost at meme status, and occasionally we see waves of blunt enforcement through downvoting of comments, or through posts designed to shame people.
There are basically two ways this can end:
1. The community becomes extremely rigid and insular, developing rules and conventions to protect itself at the cost of new members who get run off or never join in the first place. Wikipedia seems to be at this stage right now, if you'd like an example.
2. The "old guard" (who aren't necessarily original or even early members) either migrate away or get over it, and the community adapts and keeps on growing. Places like Fark, where stupidity and outright trolls just get mocked mercilessly, provide useful examples of this.
Reddit, I think, is either at or approaching the second option. Yes, there's dumb stuff posted, yes, there are comments making fun of people, but the community there seem to have realized that's not the end of the world. And because they're much less rigid and much less concerned with "is this appropriate for reddit", there's a lot more room for creativity, for humor, and for lots of other stuff that just couldn't happen on HN. And I'll take that any day, which is why I spend most of my time reading reddit instead of HN.