This is a reach. If anything Reddit is consolidating previous verticals - e.g. standalone forums.
Additionally I've heard this complaint so many times, but I don't find Reddit ugly at all. What do people want? Tag clouds, gradients and flash everywhere, or what? What's a less ugly forum/comment layout than Reddit?
Not to mention commonly being saddled with a 10yr old model of PHPbb style boards.
1. Change the #0000FF links. Something, anything, slightly desaturated from pure blue would look better IMO. <Insert contrast comments here>
2. Whitespace. I can feel the function over form guys typing away furiously from here! BUT YOU CAN FIT MORE CATZ WITH LESS WHITESPACE! I like a little bit of extra whitespace, so sue me. I think an extra 20 pixels between submissions would go a long way. Maybe even a light HR too?
3. The "tabs" at the top are just flat ugly and dated. In fact, everything within the blue header just looks dated.
http://www.reddit.com/r/googleplus for example does a nice job of making Reddit look better without drastic changes. Although I think their titles could be slightly larger and I hate text-decoration: underline;
As for the ugly, I think it looks fine. At least, I'd rather have it be a bit on the plain side than have megabytes of garish colors everywhere like a 2003 Myspace page that takes 30 seconds for each page to load.