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Comment by redwood | Hacker News Reader

Honestly IMO the biggest problem with reddit's subreddit UX is that you can't choose the ratio of which subreddits are most important to you. Unfortunately you're not really fixing that... I think that would be more powerful than showing groups of subreddits.

In other words, I should be able to say "I want 30% of my links to come from r/worldnews, 10% from r/science, 5% each from r/biology, r/programming, r/chemistry, r/physics, r/neuro, 20% from r/foodforthought, and 20% from r/truereddit.

Even a simple UI dragger that would let me boost the prominence of certain subreddits in my feed would be great.. Otherwise, small but awesome subreddits have a tough time getting seen anywhere near the top of my feed.

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"I want 30% of my links to come from r/worldnews, 10% from r/science, 5% each from r/biology, r/programming, r/chemistry, r/physics, r/neuro, 20% from r/foodforthought, and 20% from r/truereddit."

Huh. That's a really good idea.

It is, but I think it's tough to do well. Google+ implements this thing where you tell it how much of each circle to show, but then you have to do these weights up front.

Ideally system would try to figure out what you like by measuring time spent reading threads, upvotes, link clicks, etc and automatically set those weights for you. This doesn't preclude giving users the options manually setting weights, which could be another useful signal.

Take this idea to its extreme, and you've arrived at StumbleUpon.

It might not be exactly the solution you're looking for, but the Reddit Enhancement Suite [1] has a dashboard where you can add subreddits as widgets and limit the number of stories you want to show per widget.

[1]: http://redditenhancementsuite.com/

I agree that this is a huge problem that reddit has. I hardly ever see any stories on my frontpage from the smaller subreddits I subscribe to.

Really? I have had the opposite experience: if I subscribe to a small an mostly inactive subreddit, I notice what I consider to be too many links from that subreddit on the front page.

It seems to me that you do not want to be able to say that. You want to see relevant and interesting posts.

I've been on reddit long enough to know that in order to see what I consider interesting, requires a balance of what others (e.g. subreddits) consider interesting. However I have varying levels of interest in them, and some are small and cannot compete...

Also that r/atheism keeps up-voting itself. As a Atheist from birth I find them obnoxious and repetitive.

Wait, what does "up-voting itself" mean? Do people that use the numerous cat subreddits not vote for cat pictures?

I am under the impression the point of subreddits is to allow you to subscribe or not subscribe, so why not just not subscribe to r/atheism? That's how I use it anyway.

@mistermann

Why would you browse "r/all" if you didn't want.. all?

This seems to be an imagined problem.

I feel like they show lack of discrimination, with almost everything being up-voted and not much variation in content.

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