The Guidelines[1] say it better than I can.

“If your account is less than a year old, please don’t submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It’s a common semi-noob illusion.)”

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My account is more than a year old, and after viewing the submitted link I have to agree with his assessment. Frankly, those guidelines were written years before HN actually did turn into Reddit. In any case, in lieu of casca's seniority, please accept mine as a waiver for that particular anachronistic guideline.

Reddit is..Reddit. I used to think Reddit was dumb and I started going deeper, and quite frankly Reddit scares the shit out of me sometimes. The occasional meme is funny but HN isn't near what Reddit is.

Scary how?

Just some of the deep/dark/scary/nasty stuff that gets thrown around. Haha.

That’s fair. Still, I don’t think the occasional low-quality link means HN is transmogrifying into Reddit, or otherwise declining.

A year or two ago, this would have been flagged to death by now.

To be clearer, I'm not saying or implying that HN is becoming Reddit. Rather that this particular content looks like it belongs on Reddit given the lack of substance and allegedly amusing animated gifs.

On the one hand, it's dumb. On the other hand, it's REALLY well observed.

I am sorry, But I did not quite get what you mean here.