May I make the suggestion of installing Reddit Enhancement Suite. Unsubscribe from all the default sub/r's (wtf, offbeat,askreddit, etc), and block all posts from imgur and quickmeme, and things look a lot better.

Doesn't really help. The Reddit "culture" infects everything, not just the main subs.

I suppose for example /r/gamedev isn't awful, but really, GameDev.net is much bigger and better. There's little reason to bother with Reddit.

I did all this actually. I blocked imgur, so the majority of the posts were from Tinypic. The whole community has changed.