[bitshiftfaced]

> It's the smallest subs I subscribe to that never make it to my front page.

This is a big flaw in Reddit's algorithm if you ask me. On your feed, small subs get crowded out by large ones, despite the fact that you may be more interested in the small sub.

It doesn't seem very hard to improve. They could use the click rate or upvote rate to weigh the interest of each sub as well as normalize how many upvotes an item got based on the average upvotes an item gets within a particular sub.

[paulmd]

they already do over-weight content from smaller subs, it seems proportional to how much activity a "normal" thread from that sub sees and if something is very popular in a smaller sub it'll pop to the top.

it's just not enough to outweight very regular, very popular content from the mega-subs. And more threads in popular subs increases the chance of something going viral. How often does something from r/zfs catch fire, really catch fire? Not that much. Even if that's only 100 upvotes for a smaller sub, it just doesn't happen that much. Smaller subs are generally closer to their average, they go viral less.

Frankly maybe 5 years ago I blocked Gallowboob and filtered a lot of the larger content-churn subreddits and it's dramatically improved the overall experience. There is (or was) still plenty of content in r/popular and the frontpage.