It's the crisis of the hyperlink: It's diminished to the point where Google is afraid of losing it's previously dominant signal for good.

Personal publishing has moved almost entirely to platforms that `nofollow` links. And commercial sites do whatever it takes to avoid linking anywhere but back, deeper into their own site.

There have been some cases where I think people are behaving somewhat irresponsible with "nofollow": the German Wikipedia, for example, does it to all outbound links.

That's understandable from a spam-fighting perspective. But, if search engines actually implement it draconically, it deprives the search index of vast amounts of collaborative filtering.

I actually just checked, and couldn't find nofollows on either HN or Reddit links. Are they somehow setting them via some method other than the actual link tag?

In any case, I was going to suggest that nofollow makes sense for the "new" queue, but it wouldn't hurt and possibly help to remove it once user generated content has reached certain milestones, i. e. user karma, or hitting the front page.