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Reddit appears to only show images to posts about the image, not to a website. Most of reddit content are just posts to images and the discussion about the image, so IMHO that improves reddit's usability for their target audience.

HN is more about interesting content/discussion instead of posting memes and it is much harder to scan and determine interesting content from images than it is from titles. As a note: when HN has the same target audience as reddit is when i stop using HN.

What was stopping people from taking the same click-bait approach to the text titles? Titles on reddit are still pretty damn nondescript, and rarely have actual relevant information in them.

Honestly it was a difference in the userbase and how they interacted. There's some unknown threshold of users where once a platform becomes too popular it begins to degrade. I'd say pre-2010 reddit is a vastly different beast than today.

Well you can easily disable them (I always do).