That's not what Buzzfeed is doing, though - they are taking individual quotes and snippets from the Reddit thread and weaving them into a narrative and descript

That's not what Buzzfeed is doing, though - they are taking individual quotes and snippets from the Reddit thread and weaving them into a narrative and description written in their own words. You could in fact do the same with a NYT article and it wouldn't be copyright infringement; there are many, many publications which create such articles based on mainstream news sources.