Reddit is Usenet 2.0. Usenet never had a "just browse all the most popular groups" though, mercifully. Same rules apply; the more narrow the group and the more connected to something real, the more likely it is to be useful. Reddit should be viewed as raw material from which to construct a personalized experience of value, and all of its default affordances (/r/all, default subreddits, etc) should be shunned if you're worried about this sort of thing, because they're all terrible, compared to what you can find if you try.
I've got the language communities for all the computer languages I'm currently interested in, a couple of things I'm sorta hobbiest-level interested in (SpaceX, for instance) and want more in-depth news, a couple of weird off-the-wall subs that have a low post rate (/r/scp, /r/cellular_automata) for a more, ah, "refined" sort of entertainment (and perhaps more importantly, simply less entertainment), and a couple of subreddits being used as "more intelligent comments & discussion" for some internet shows hosted on YouTube. The upshot is a stream of news that isn't dropping 100 links an hour on me, is generally interesting, and mostly full of real people having real conversations about things I find interesting and not merely 50-level deep pun competitions.
Comments
Reddit is Usenet 2.0. Usenet never had a "just browse all the most popular groups" though, mercifully. Same rules apply; the more narrow the group and the more connected to something real, the more likely it is to be useful. Reddit should be viewed as raw material from which to construct a personalized experience of value, and all of its default affordances (/r/all, default subreddits, etc) should be shunned if you're worried about this sort of thing, because they're all terrible, compared to what you can find if you try.
I've got the language communities for all the computer languages I'm currently interested in, a couple of things I'm sorta hobbiest-level interested in (SpaceX, for instance) and want more in-depth news, a couple of weird off-the-wall subs that have a low post rate (/r/scp, /r/cellular_automata) for a more, ah, "refined" sort of entertainment (and perhaps more importantly, simply less entertainment), and a couple of subreddits being used as "more intelligent comments & discussion" for some internet shows hosted on YouTube. The upshot is a stream of news that isn't dropping 100 links an hour on me, is generally interesting, and mostly full of real people having real conversations about things I find interesting and not merely 50-level deep pun competitions.
Reddit's what you make of it.