Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit? Terrible UX, mostly useless answers (most replies to posts are either poorly sarcastic or not replying to the actual point). Before it wasn't like this. Did the Reddit board voluntarily or involuntarily cause this via technical decisions, or it's just unavoidable to get this degradation after the userbase grows too much? |
Entertainment (aka funny) makes money. Useful information can make money but not nearly as much as entertainment.
My favourite subreddit?
Hacker News is _still_ not like this because:
1. Their subscriber count is relatively low compared to, say, /r/pics 2. dang and co are basically benevolent tyrants and are ultra quick about removing low-quality discussion 3. The topics are more-or-less consistent, largely due to (2) but also community response that has been shaped by (2) over time
Many of the less popular subs and all of the SUPER-well-moderated large subs (/r/History, /r/askscience) are like this. /r/COVID19 was an extremely important component in the race towards the vaccine, for example, while /r/coronavirus was doomscrolling on tap with lots of disinformation. Both are large communities.
New Reddit aside (old Reddit is safe for now), I don't think much about Reddit has changed in the 10 years I've been on it.
In other words... kind of a waste of time, for a lot of topics.
The UX redesign was hugely successful in attracting new users, users who could then be monetized.
The "useless answers" are wildly popular responses because people generally prefer to meme, not solve problems.
Your complaint essentially boils down to, "Why do people not behave how I want them to?" and that, my friend, is a question as old as time itself.
From the HN guidelines, but it also applies to Reddit:
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob[0] illusion[1], as[2] old[3] as[4] the[5] hills[6].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926703
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=633099
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=582513
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289254
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253657
Mobile users fundamentally engage with the platform in different ways. For one, they form a different demographic segment than older users, and secondly the mobile app frames and filters content in uniquely mobile ways. High-signal content is much more difficult to craft on a mobile device so more mobile use represents a greater proportion of content noise.
Early adopters seek high-signal over content quantity and will move platforms if the opportunity arises. Such a migration will play into future case studies critiquing Reddits MAU-chasing at the expense of hollowing out their long-time user base.
More like hoards them into the app with a cattle prod. You can't use the mobile site without constantly confirming that no, I really really really don't want to use the app like I said 20 seconds ago.
This is beyond dark patterns. It's pure user hostility.
As far as I can tell reddit's website provides minimal income and is just an ad for their app.
You'd think they'd know better, but maybe to them, replacing high-information-demanding users with a casual audience is a feature and not a bug.
* A doubling of mobile app downloads in the past year
* Valuation increase of 4Bn in 6 months (from ~6Bn to ~10Bn) (Feb 2021 to Aug 2021)
* Revenue growth forecast over 250%
I guess we're all kind of used to the idea that Reddit keeps growing, because it more or less has since it was created (citation needed), but the nature of exponential growth is such that maybe we're a bit numb to just how big the numbers have gotten in the past year or so.
What the heck they removed my subs from the sidebar and add it back from time to time, move the avatar every week, and constantly generate fake notification dot even there isn't any? It's just annoying that you see it says you have notification, you click and there isn't any.
This is the most dumb app I ever seen. And this is also the first time I use an alternative client on a social platform because the vanilla one is so useless.
I'd argue the only thing that really matters about mobile users is they are online _way_ more often. Engagement can be higher on mobile because the access is mobile.
These asshole admins then followed me to another, related sub where they permanently banned me for answering another user's question about a product; again with no excuse. This reveals the depressing fact that Reddit is an inbred community of inbred moderators who bully users for fun and render the entire platform a waste of effort. You spend a bunch of time helping people, only to have your work deleted and being made to feel like you're the bad guy. Just typing this out, I'm getting pissed-off and tense, for having done nothing offensive at all. Who needs that in his day?
I discovered Reddit after Digg sold out and became a spam aggregator, and everyone abandoned it in favor of Reddit. I see that someone below also referred to this incident, and marked it as the beginning of the decline of Reddit. I find it odd to blame the Digg ex-pats because Digg was (in its heyday) a tech-news site not too different from this one.
But not long after arriving at Reddit, I did notice that the technical content soon diminished and was replaced by an endless stream of cutesy "This little guy followed me home" posts about stray animals or other pleasant but wholly useless content.
Sad.
> Therefore its bogus!
What kind of reasoning is that?
Incidentally, if you’re really into HN guidelines, it might be a good idea to avoid inflammatory comments that lack the evidence to back them up.
Is there evidence for that?
There's a small but significant group of users who would probably quit reddit if old reddit went away. Keeping them around for (what I assume is) minimal cost is just good business.
I use it anyways in Brave to limit how much tracking Reddit can do on me, but I feel like that's probably a fools errand at this point.
I've seen subreddits with less than 50000 subscribers who had enough purchases to cover 3 years of server cost. /r/aww alone paid for 772 years of server time according to their calculations.
Reddit could go on indefinitely as is with no advertising.
I don't think the goal of tech companies is to just "go on indefinitely." Their investors need them to make billions of dollars.
Given that the technology is solved, and the financing is solved, I wish there were a way to build such a website with such a community without the cycle always ending in its destruction for the sake of profit.
Or "more ads better"
It’s a balance between making things easier to use while also that letting in everyone. And the hoi polloi are just regular people.
Not to sound snobby, but different people like different things. And McDonalds is a $200B company for a reason.
So now they’re on Reddit just being interested in regular stuff and raging and whatnot.
With the masses comes company attention and fake accounts and SEO so the corporate content is low value but prevalent.
I still use Reddit for my subreddits and get good info. But it’s harder to weed out things.
Finally, I had a curious interaction with a company trying to take over my subreddit. I started /r/grass fed years ago when I was interested in this. Not a lot of activity. Some marketing company for an unnamed company petitioned to take it over as if it was abandoned. When I responded that it’s not abandoned, just not very active and that they were welcome to post as much as they like the sub stayed with me as a mod. But they didn’t post anything. Makes me wonder what kind of company wants to mod a sub in order to participate. And how common this is.
Some of reddit is terrible: relentlessly pushing people to the mobile app, garbage notifications system.
VC chickens coming home to roost, the inevitable ultimate fate of every single VC-funded startup
>mostly useless answers (most replies to posts are either poorly sarcastic or not replying to the actual point)
1) reddit format is vastly inferior to classic forums for serious discussion. everything except for a couple stickied threads is ephemeral
2) the culture is dominated by repetitive low-quality humor and insufferable soapboxing that spills over into topical subreddits
I find ephemera one of the most enjoyable aspects of most social media - most of what's talked about is inherently time-based
Sure, it's helpful to be able to find some forum post or Reddit thread on replacing a freezer control board for your 2011 upright Frigidaire (not that that happened to me in the last week, or anything ;)) - but most topics are inherently short-lived
TLDR: Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-normalised cultural products.
https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...
On the plus side Reddit search has improved the last five years or so.
I'm one of about two semi-technical Reddit users in the world who doesn't mind the new desktop browser interface.
I guess I carefully curate my Reddit feeds, but I don't find it hard to find quality posts. I may just be good at ignoring the bad ones.
I also like the desktop interface, and curate what groups I'm in
For the content degradation, I find that creating an account, unsubscribing from all the default subreddits, and subscribing to niche subreddits works well. There are still plenty of great smaller communities within Reddit.
From the smattering of comments I read here today... it seems like it
I also find that the subs I'm in are of decent-to-high quality - though none are especially large/high-traffic (ie they're all pretty niche)
"Both sides" fallacies, typically having a political meaning, are naturally going to get exploited on social media sites where both sides upvote the poorly baked, emotionally charged fallacies.
It is alarming to me as a statnerd that the NBA and NFL communities seem to be getting dumber as time goes on, not smarter, but I'm not positive this is a Reddit problem (but possibly, due to how mainstream it is now).
In addition to what sunspark said, I've heard that the average /r/nba person doesn't actually watch games, and only participates for the memes.
When they go public soon, they're going to lock all the user-generated content behind their mobile app, and remove access from the website and APIs. Thanks for the content, suckers!
The UK ones are all bizarre in-jokes about stereotypes that are not at all realistic of people in the real world. It’s like people feel they have to say weird things so they fit in.
“Does anyone else love tea? Ho ho ho, I really don’t like the television programme Miranda that hasn’t even been on for 9 or 10 years. Oh god, when people try and talk to me on the tube I just die?!”
It was always weak as far as posts and activity in the larger subreddits etc due to the natural effects of huge numbers of random users. The quality of users has declined enormously because of memes and just general public use, but that's the way it is.
Reddit is not really that special, it had explosive user growth due to lack of options out there and ease of use for most to just engage and/or run small forum-like communities. It was almost dead! Back before some big missteps by other players made it get really lucky in user growth. A momentum boost from a fluke.
And that's where the value/real stuff is: the rest of it - all the countless smaller communities -- reddit is basically a forum system for them, and they with the help of dedicated mods etc, people that care about the connections and community, it works great. That's it. That's all it is.
I spend a lot of time reading incredibly engaging and useful content on reddit (web/official app) these days.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Catsubs/wiki/index/
You're welcome! :-D
Second mistake was banning and removing subs that were controversial and might or might not have been frowned upon by advertiser.
Old Reddit used to break news first, now reddit is just 9gag
I think I would have been able to goto the website and appeal, but I didn't really want to be part of it any more in the end. A year later, I don't miss it. I just consider it dead.
The people who moderate the website aren't capable of behaving impartially. The admins who are supposed to moderate the platform are selected from that group. The result is unsurprising.
I think it's gotten better, not worse. Though the variance between subreddits is high, so if you're not subredditing well, ymmv.
My only complaint are their dark patterns pushing the mobile app.
The barrier to entry for internet communities has dropped like a rock over the last 10 years as smartphone usage has become ubiquitous. So you do have more average and below average intelligence (but still very real) people interacting online than ever before, by a wide margin from back in the mid 2000's.
I have seen the bot argument taken to the extreme by some when there was no indication it wasn't a person, so yeah it does get blown out of the water a lot of times just to try and shut down conversation. Even more so in political related discussions, people are so quick to call bot/shill on some topics, and I wonder how much of that has been influenced by the media narrative around the "Russian troll farms". One section of the population are entirely convinced that Hillary would have won if not for the bots/trolls, and use that to deflect from any other criticism of how she actually conducted herself / campaigned. Another section of the population looks at that argument as ridiculous, and dismiss bots/shill's as a delusion by the "other side" entirely.
Countless studies have shown the initial trajectory of a post dictates its upvote/downvote ratio over time. Bots commonly will ensure the first few comments dominate most of the threads views.
Conservatives are reaching younger people the same way candy companies reach kids. By feeding them a diet of sugar shit that's going to have massive long term negative consequences. "Nothing is your fault, hate all immigrants" is a great way to reach someone that can't get a job and wants to blame someone else. It's not going to get them a job, it's not going to fix their situation. Oh boy, but it does generate engagement.
Also, anyone interested in putting in effort should unsubscribe from any sub that shows up on /r/all and find smaller communities; that's where the real value proposition of reddit lies.
The community itself when you get away from the big main subreddits isn't too bad. The best experience is had when you unsub from all the main subreddits and only browse the smaller niche ones. Although they can be pretty toxic too. If you're looking for better quality in depth discussion on a hobby or topic I'm sure you already know better forums, but if you want beginners guides and more superficial meme chat it's a great resource on the whole.
old (resolves to old.reddit.com) new (resolves to news.ycombinator.com)
It makes me chuckle.
Not to mention it brings even a powerful machine to its knees..
Every reddit looked like a geocities offering to me, they were inconsistent in coloring and contrast and all the bullshit I don't care about. Non-old reddit gave me a more consistent and less distracting way for me to quickly browse subreddits and posts I'm interested in and getting out.
The day they kill old.reddit is the day I stop reading it.
If they get rid of old.reddit, I might quit just because of how hostile to the users I'd view that but I wouldn't quite because of the UI.
The only thing that I feel I miss out on in using old.reddit.com is the predictions. The /r/muaythai has a predictions tournament that's pretty fun but there's no way to get notifications that there are new predictions to be made with the old interface (as far as I know).
Even better: https://reddit.com/.compact
Primarily it's easier to toggle comments.
The actual problem is the performance. The new UX is just so terribly laggy. And even eat 20~30% cpu by literally just 4 tabs on my old 2700
How could they done such a bad job on coding a forum site? I just don't understand.
Edit - to prove my point further, take a look at the top 1000 posts on r/all from 10 years ago.[1] Does that look like quality content to you? Once again, the front-page of Reddit and the large subs have been hot garbage since day 1. Nothing has changed in that respect. You've always had to go the smaller subs for quality content.
LOL. Reddit peaked long before 2012.
No, not in my experience. Not compared to small focused forums on any moderately complex or interesting topic anyway. The whole format is designed for quick throwaway content and not for having long nuanced discussions and so the subreddit will be oriented towards just that. Worse still I think it might even poison the brains of the Redditors into thinking that the subreddit is all their is to the topic.
My experience on reddit has been universally negative regardless of community size. The site's very design discourages quality content.
* The "Digg invasion", when Digg 4.0 came out in 2013. This is when reddit turned into mostly memes. Before that, the frontpage was closer to slashdot, but much more open conversation around it. (of course there were still ffuuuu comics, but we dont talk about those)
* The pandemic in 2020. It seems like your typical Facebook user started using reddit. Reddiquette is no longer a thing -- if you don't agree with something you downvote. Alternative views aren't supported, people don't want their views challenged. I think this has been the biggest culture shift and probably what you're getting at. It's people looking to kill time rather than adventure to learn something new.
In the last couple of months people have even been spotting "organized bot groups" that not only repost old popular content, but also immediately populate said reposts with the popular comments of the previous thread.
I've seen a few popular comments bots give themselves away accidently by posting the same comment under a thread under different user names. Go and look at the accounts, and they are all the same comments, but generally in different threads. Because they seem to have been human comments at some point in the past, they seem to be much harder to detect for the average user.
They look for highly voted comments which typically have more upvotes than the comment they are responding to, but they're stuck under an ultimate grandparent comment which isn't the highest voted comment, and then the bot posts that comment in the comment chain under the top comment trying to farm karma.
They're now truncating the comment so it isn't a perfect match, which often results in "am i having a stroke?" comments under it as they mangle it.
I guess you do that and even if 99 accounts get banned the 1 account that gets a pile of karma can be sold off to social media companies / troll farms to push whatever their agenda is.
If you're judging by /r/all, sure, it's not much better than YouTube comments. As much as I hate this word, it's mostly "normies" with "normie" views. The cream rarely rises to the top, except on humor threads.
But other than that, I don't think Reddit has changed too much for the worse in the 14 or so years since I've used it. The demographic has gotten more mainstream, and arguably dumber, but that's just a microcosm of the Internet. It's still better on Reddit than many other places.
The only true fix to this is either firm AND benevolent moderation (really only works for small stuff, like HN), or just ditching usernames and internet points altogether. 4chan was, for the most part, low quality discussion, but people at least had a reason behind their post that wasn't ego-flaming to save face on their pseudonymous internet account/getting internet points to feel like they had some clout.
As for UI I think we all agree, it's horrible. That's what old.reddit.com is for, it's still a sane UI overall. On Mobile I use Apollo (iOS) but anything but the default app is a huge step up.
Usenet is dead. Reddit, Facebook, Twitter are dying. Something will take their place, become popular, and it will eventually die for the same reasons.
HN is able to avoid this with heavy moderation and the participants agreeing to root out bad behavior (with downvotes and/or flags). Free speech online is something I used to consider a "right" we all should have. I have swung to the almost opposite end of the spectrum. On the internet, at least, it leads to toxic ghost towns and more often than not the moderators who attempt to allow "free speech" will overcorrect for their biases and reprimand people they agree with and let the ones they don't slide (in an attempt to not appear biased).
About the only places that don't get completely ate up with it are so dark and foul your risking other facets of your mental health by visiting them.
While reddit still has great points, I feel there needs to be a new reddit that has its core rules based on courtesy and some kind of intelligence/knowledge test before people can comment, and have to repeat if they can't follow basic polite and value add conversation.
If you're browsing on a desktop, configure your account to always use the old reddit experience. If you lurk without an account, use old.reddit.com. If you can, install RES, it's a game-changer.
If you're browsing on mobile, don't use the official reddit app. It's garbage. Use one of the many 3rd party apps. Personally, I use Bacon Reader.
Don't bother ever browsing /r/all. Tailor your subscriptions to the subs you actually care about.
Try to find more niche subreddits. Subs like /r/AskReddit are just massive karma farms.
Which is understandable considering that since the redesign, they have been more and more working against a black box, with the Reddit staff actively trying to prevent access to certain functionalities outside of their clients.
I'm still worried about Reddit turning off old.reddit.com one day, or making some major breaking change crippling RES. Tho it could be a good way to quit using it, as the friction of the new design overpowering by far my desire to go on it.
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/RESAnnouncements/comments/sh83gx/an...
I really do wish that the default feed wasn't such a burning trash pile.
I've had the option turned on since the day they offered it and it's never worked for me.
Just a few people with bots can make your moderating job absolute hell, especially from a non-admin level where you can block things at a lower level.
In my opinion, moderators of an online forum are like the leadership team of a company. With bad leadership all the good people leave, and only the bottom feeders remain.
But it's also because Reddit is growing more and more popular, and eventually the demographics will to match the population as a whole rather than a self selecting, more dedicated sample of it. Hence ypu get the same idiocy as in other situations and on other large social media services.
Reminds me of Meg Whitman running ebay into the ground while collecting billions and eventually getting wrecked by Amazon. They're still around but a shell of their former relevance.
It’s getting hard to find the things eBay was famous for (used goods) amongst all the buyitnow alibaba junk.
We have old.reddit.com for now, but I feel like that’s just temporary sugar for the medicine to go down while people get used to getting pushed to the mobile app. If they took that away, and there’s really no guarantee it’ll always be there, I don’t know what else I’d use. There’s Discord but it’s such a different interaction model that it doesn’t feel like a valid alternative.
Those that do find financing always seem to bring up the question of "Why is X group giving them Y millions of dollars, what are they going to get out of it and what are they asking for".
For most of the past decade, Reddit have pursued a growth path, with features and changes designed to hook and keep on-site an ever-growing number of eyeballs. Put the blame for that squarely on Conde Nast / Advance Publications / Steven Newhouse (CEO).
This has had corresponding impacts on the quality of discourse. My own response, as noted at my personal subreddit, is to take my time and attention elsewhere, which seems to be widely reflected across other subreddits I've followed. (See: https://teddit.net/r/dredmorbius, particularly pinned posts.)
HN has remained one of those places --- moderation, search, and a reasonably-well curated membership seem to help. It's not ideal, but it's dramatically better than typical online forums, and has maintained a remarkably even keel for going on two decades, all but unheard of.
For various reasons, progress to implementing an independent blog have lagged.
As a lark I created a new account that blocks idiots, though I've not used that sufficiently to determine if it has a positive impact on S:N ratios, though I suspect it might. The idiots are, however, legion.
If anyone else wants to try that practice and report on results, I'd be interested in how well it does or does not work.
I feel it's probably just a reversion to the mean effect. As more people adopt the Reddit platform, the platform becomes more and more like facebook.
My theory is just that if anyone can join, and everything is anonymous and there is no barrier to entry [1], quality of communication will just be low. Makes me think about how some Ham Radio enthusiasts want to keep Morse Code as a requirement to get a license even though it's not really needed, it simply acts as a good filter for keeping less prudent people out of the eco-system. For web boards, maybe September will never end [2].
Hope this all isn't too cynical and please speak up if it sounds so.
[1] I realize HN is easy to join but is often seen as having far superior discussion than Reddit. I think there's just something about heavily technical article titles and topics that make it a bigger lift to want to jump in with trivial but aggressive arguing. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
I browse old.reddit.com because I think that text feel is better.
I think it probably depends on your subreddit or area of interest? For my making hobbies I find it to be the best forum out there. Extremely good for my sports and television discussion as well.
-Obvious bot activity has increased, probably coordinated by troll farms warming up accounts then pushing public opinion.
-The Overton Window has slammed shut. Speech on both the right and the left has been massively curtailed. It has been decided from high up that the US population needs a cooling off period which makes all conversations quite bloodless.
-The real organic user base of people willing to invest in participation has dried up. Many niche subreddits that previously had lively and interesting communities and subcultures are now ghost towns. For example I follow some VR and travel subreddits where the participation has absolutely cratered.
My guess is that the above have scared off the high value users that drive novelty and engagement and that the whole platform is a shell just waiting to crack.
I'm amazed HN can still find some periphirally related topic to talk about and save an otherwise dead thread.
The statistic of 'missed topics' would be really interesting if you could parse what people were really wanting to talk about.
The real sense of community which enabled so much valuable information flow was stamped out. Community was replaced with politics, auto mods and feudal lords crushing dissent instead of leading discussion.
But you're right, it's slower to load and generally slower to navigate, although opening and closing a post is a smidge faster for me in the new ui. I think Reddit got enough VC capital that it has to try to make a return on and they still haven't really come up with a great way to monetize the communities they host. So they're blowing money on engineering and probably seeing more users.
I'm not a product person, idk what the real answer is on what Reddit should have done. I agree I dislike a lot of what they added to it, but I'm just not a product person. I guess having steady growth and a reasonable amount of ad revenue just wasn't cutting it after a while.
Like any Internet forum, of course it'll have its issues, particularly on the Reddit scale, but for the most part, I think it's pretty decent and I find it way better than most other 'social media' platforms.
NOTE: RES is a must-have for me: https://redditenhancementsuite.com/
You are in the wrong subs
I agree though that default /r/all subs are overly politicized and most of them are utter thrash
Usually this would be bad, but not when your old community was the dorks on Reddit. So they no longer have the problem where the first reply to every post is a long chain of bad puns and the second one is the answer.
Some of the default subs did seem to get all their content replaced with Facebook memes, and AskReddit shows me a teenager posting a new “how do I get the ladies to like me?” question every day, but that’s life.
old.reddit.com -- You're welcome.
> mostly useless answers
Any sufficiently popular platform degrades like this (including the entire internet itself).
> or it's just unavoidable to get this degradation after the userbase grows too much?
Pretty much. HN has pretty ferocious moderation, which is required unless you want every other response to be "sigh unzips." You see this in individual forums in general...once they grow past a certain size, the original intent is watered down, discussion suffers, etc etc.
That said, there are plenty of places on reddit that are still great.
The mods on subreddits are a problem too. There is no recourse. If they decide to ban you for any reason, that's the end of it, even if no rule has been broken. If you message modmail to ask for more information, they can just mute you from messaging modmail.
An absolutely site-killing problem. If you actually try to pursue specific topics on subreddits, you find they're administered by a bunch of babies wallowing in their little sandboxes and throwing tantrums for no apparent reason.
The pandemic had nothing to do with it: people have been making this complaint about reddit for fifteen years. Rediquette was always a myth.
I don't disagree with this but I'm not sure what I'd consider a reasonable solution. One thing I will say though is that the moderators on default subs promote this behavior. If I were to try to change the situation, I think that's where I'd start.
For example, I'm fairly certain I'm shadowbanned on r/news and my positions on topics range from moderate to liberal, depending on the topic.
Some of the bigger subs have 100+ moderators so people don't realize the massive scale of moderation going on.
The idea that comments get deleted because they are 'bad faith', racist, or whatever is wildly incorrect. Moderators act like editors of their own pet newspapers where the comments are the content.
That's always been a thing.
It's been a few years now, and they still haven't fixed so you can copy and paste text in their text inputs.
I'm using Firefox 100 on Monterey, but I'm sure it worked on previous Firefox versions on Windows 10.
That is the only way to use any social media, for me at least.
Moderation is endless work if your community is attracting new users to any degree.
The better and more readable articles linked on HN could demonstrate this phenomena, if the audience shows better comments underneath them. I haven't looked for the correlation before.
In the 11+y I've been on Reddit, never seen that behavior
This is the same issue IRC has. In the old days, if you were lucky, sometimes you could unseat a tyrant, but modern IRC channel ownership is enforced by the server itself.
This is part of why I like Twitter, even though I haven't been active on it in some time. People have to opt-in to you on Twitter. It's impossible to be a tyrant on Twitter, you cannot compel people to pay attention to you there. The disadvantage of Twitter of course is that it's full of bots so you have to put together your own curated lists of people that seem reasonable. I don't even look at the home feed.
You can't "compel people to pay attention to you" on Reddit (or HN, Facebook, etc) either
Mute/block/ban exists on pretty much every social media platform (with the possible exception of HN (at least - I've never seen it hereon))
If you wish to control a conversation in some sort of strange manner, all you need to do is state something outrageous and plainly wrong, and then block the other person arguing with you. It makes you look like you got the last word because they can't respond and your comment stays up.