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Comment by pjscott | Hacker News Reader

Unsubscribe from /r/politics. Unsubscribe from /r/worldnews. Find the handful of subreddits that are bothering you and unsubcribe from them. The discussions I read on Reddit are overall nicer than those on HN, not because the userbase as a whole is better, but because it has sewers where the crap is concentrated -- and you can easily avoid them. That's one of their most important features.

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I would go a step further and say the first thing a new Reddit account should do is unsubscribe from everything, then selectively subscribe to your interests. Every default subreddit is horrible.

In my experience, the academic subreddits found in the defaults are pretty civil (i.e. science, philosophy, space, history). But they all have well-defined mission statements and heavy-handed moderation (e.g. no memes or any other kind of offtopic discussion).

That said, starting from zero is still a good idea.

I would extend that further to _unsubscribe from all default subreddits_.

Start from a blank slate and search for subreddits that actually interest you and seem reasonable. Yeah, you're also creating an "echo chamber" if you participate in polarizing topics, but hopefully you're aware that you're doing that to yourself.

If you try to create a new account there is a signup flow where you pick subs from categories. Defaults are not a thing anymore.

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