Reddit allows you to find the latest news and interact with communities on almost anything. However, with the number of subreddits and popularity of the platform, your home feed can quickly get overwhelming.
Luckily, there are multiple ways to customize your Reddit home feed so that the content you see is what you like. So, without further ado, let's get started.
1. Sorting the Reddit Home Feed
You can sort the home feed in multiple ways, affecting how posts appear on the home feed for you. You can sort by Best, Top, New, and Hot. All have their pros and cons, so pick the one that makes the most sense for you.
Sorting Reddit Posts by Best
When sorting by Best, you'll see posts with the best upvote/downvote ratio on your home feed. These posts are likely to be the top-performing posts, which usually means they will be engaging content that's accurate and appreciated by the community.
Sorting by Best is great if you want to only see the best pieces of content around your interests. However, there could be posts or comments you agree with that get buried simply because users disagreed with an opinion and downvoted them to oblivion.
Sorting Reddit Posts by New
Sorting by New means that only the most recent posts and comments will appear on your home feed, descending in order of how recent the post was.
Sorting by New is beneficial if you use Reddit to keep track of news or the latest industry developments. It's not so great if you want to limit the amount of useless content you see and can also mean that you miss the best content for the subreddits you're subscribed to.
Sorting Reddit Posts by Hot
If you sort by Hot, your Reddit home feed will be full of posts that have recently gained a surge of upvotes. These tend to be posts that are either controversial or are picking up traction. Don't be surprised if you see a lot of posts in Hot that will also display if you switch to Best.
The advantage of sorting by Hot is seeing content others interested in your subreddits engage with. The problem with sorting by Hot is that you may find many controversial or low-effort posts that karma farmers have posted. Reddit karma can be earned in different ways on the platform, and lots of users typically repost content guaranteed to amass tons of upvotes, so you may want to watch out for that as that can sometimes skew the posts that you see.
Sorting Reddit Posts by Top
Similar to sorting by Best and Hot, sorting by Top gives you a home feed full of posts with the most upvotes regardless of how many downvotes they have. Like the other sorting options, Top posts are likely to be controversial or high-quality posts, often both simultaneously.
Sorting by Top should give you the most pertinent pieces of content related to the subreddits you're in, but you may find posts that karma farmers use or controversial posts that annoy you. You can choose a time period to filter out the Top posts: Today, This Week, This Month, This Year, or All Time.
It's worth mentioning that if you don't feel satisfied with your home feed, no matter which way you've sorted it, using Reddit's discover feed to find new subreddits is a good option that could make your time on the platform better.
2. Changing Reddit's View Settings
You can customize how Reddit posts appear on your home feed with three options: Classic, Card, and Compact. Let's take a detailed look at each of them.
Card View
With the Card view, posts on your home feed will appear more narrow with the subreddit, the title of the post, and then a thumbnail or a text preview.
This view is more visual-based, which is ideal if you tend to favor image or video-based content rather than text and like to see a preview before interacting with a post.
However, since each post will take a lot of space up due to having the images and videos preloading as you scroll, it will take longer to scroll through your home feed content depending on how many subreddits you're subscribed to.
Classic View
When choosing the Classic view, each post on your home feed will use more width, with the subreddit and post title taking up most of the space and any media used in the post displayed as a thumbnail to the left.
The Classic view is useful for faster scrolling through content to find the posts you most want to interact with and has a good balance between showing text posts and media-based posts. You can see the thumbnail on the left to get an idea of what image/video a post has, and everything looks neat visually. This is the recommended view to use for most people.
Compact View
With the Compact view, you'll have a much smaller font size, with posts looking similar to the Classic view, only there are no white space breaks in between each post. Rather than displaying a thumbnail to the left as with Classic, the Compact view will give you an icon to denote the type of post, i.e., text, video, or image.
The Compact view is great if you prefer text-based posts or you're subscribed to several subreddits and typically scan through your home feed looking for posts to interact with. It may not be quite as pretty as the Classic or Card view, but it is an effective way to search Reddit and find better content quicker.
Since the Compact view removes the white space, you tend to sift through content much quicker. However, the smaller font size, lack of white space breaks between the posts, and lack of thumbnail previews mean that you may end up missing out on a lot of good content simply because of how Reddit presents them to you.
3. Hiding Specific Reddit Posts
Unfortunately, you're likely to come across advertisem*nts and posts you don't like while scrolling through your Reddit home feed. While there is no way to remove advertisem*nts from your feed unless you pay for Reddit Premium, you can Hide posts you don't want to see.
When seeing a post, you can click or tap the Hide button to instantly remove that post from your home feed. Remember that hiding a specific post doesn't feed the Reddit algorithm to hide similar posts in the future; it simply hides that particular post. It's not ideal that you have to manually hide undesired posts any time they appear, but it's simple enough to do and is instantaneous.
4. Use Reddit's Safety and Privacy Settings
You can use the Safety and Privacy Settings on your profile to prevent advertisem*nts from being invasive. This won't stop advertisem*nts from appearing on your home feed, but it will make them feel less creepy.
On the Reddit Safety and Privacy Settings page, you'll see options such as Personalize ads based on your activity with our partners, Personalize recommendations based on your general location, and more. Next to each option, you'll see the toggle to turn them On/Off. Toggle all of these Off, and the ads you're served will be less targeted, which is better since you likely ignore the advertisem*nts anyway.
5. Adjust Reddit's Feed Settings
You can adjust your feed settings to fine-tune your home feed content to your liking. By heading to the Reddit Feed Settings page, you can access a list of Content Preferences options such as Adult content, Enable home feed recommendations, and more.
All the options under Content Preferences have toggle buttons next to them, so you can toggle them to On/Off depending on your preferences to inform the posts your home feed displays.
Tailor Reddit to Your Preferences
It's essential to ensure that your favorite social media platforms give you a tailored experience that helps you get the most out of it. Customizing your Reddit home feed with various settings, view styles, and feed settings is crucial for getting the most out of the platform.
There have been some great posts on Reddit over the years that are worth checking out if you regularly use the platform.
