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Comment by wisty | Hacker News Reader

You do know you can unsubscribe to the main page, and the other default subscriptions, so your main page is entirely business, world news, programming, and Doctor Who, right?

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I know that now. I'm saying I didn't know that then, I didn't know then, that there were even sub-reddits. It wasn't until I did discover those facts that I became a reddit frequenter.

I unsubscribed from the most of the default subreddits, and my reddit life has changed. reddit doesn't seem to a big time waster anymore.

There are great subreddits that are worth checking: askscience, personalfinance, frugal, programming, and lots of that fit your interests with lower signal-to-noise ratio than the main page and the default ones.

I can't agree with askscience anymore. subreddits start their reversion to the mean once there's 50-100k users, and they become awful once they're in the default set for new users.

Frankly, it's too much work to find the good ones.

You can also just bookmark aggregate subreddits, and visit those. Example: http://www.reddit.com/r/hacks+android+iphone+webdev+startups...

I think the parent is referring to encouraging lurkers/first-time viewers to creating an account to do just that. Reddit is something that can push a lot of people away right at the get go with it's default subs (/r/atheism & /r/politics are polarizing, /r/pics can make the site look childish, etc)

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