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Comment by SchemaLoad | Hacker News Reader

The biggest change reddit made was ignoring subscriptions and just showing anything the algorithm thinks you will like. Resulting in complete no name subreddits showing on your front page. Meaning moderators no longer control content for quality, which is both a good and bad thing, but it means more garbage makes it to your front page.

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I can't remember the last time I was on the Reddit front page and I use the site pretty much daily. I only look at specific subreddit pages (barely a fraction of what I'm subscribed to).

These are some pretty niche communities with only a few dozen comments per day at most. If Reddit becomes inhospitable to them then I'll abandon the site entirely.

This is my current Reddit use case. I unsubscribed from everything other than a dozen or so niche communities. I’ve turned off all outside recommendations so my homepage is just that content (though there is feed algorithm there). It’s quick enough to sign in every day or two and view almost all the content and move on.

why would you look at the "front page" if you only wanted to see things you subscribed to? that's what the "latest" and whatever the other one is for.

they have definitely made reddit far worse in lots of ways, but not this one.

The front page when I used reddit only contained posts from your subscribed subreddits, sorted by the upvote ranking algorithm.

> why would you look at the "front page" if you only wanted to see things you subscribed to?

"Latest" ignores score and only sorts by submission time, which means you see a lot of junk if you follow any large subreddits.

The default home-page algorithm used to sort by a composite of score, recency, and a modifier for subreddit size, so that posts from smaller subreddits don't get drowned out. It worked pretty well, and users could manage what showed up by following/unfollowing subreddits.

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