Doesn’t that create a positive feedback loop? You are mostly shown things you already agree with and everything else is mostly hidden. Could create an echo chamber quite easily.
It’s that I don’t think it’s enough. Reddit offers you all the knobs you need. Want randomness? Use /all. It will give you a representative mix of what Reddit has to offer. Don’t like it? Unsubscribe from everything, then add just the communities you want. Reddit contains lots of polar opposites: atheism and various religions, subs for teenagers and for older folks, subs for frugal living and ones for lavish spending, more political ones than you can shake a stick at. I don’t see even smart people subscribing to /r/the_donald and /r/politics at the same time other to keep an eye on whichever community they don’t agree with. Reddit exposes our predisposition to joining tribes, and we join tribes based on finding people who are similar and therefore familiar to us.
IMO the only way to create a community that will challenge people’s perspectives is to specifically create a community aimed at diverse thought as its main goal. HN is kind of that because the main topic is “things that hackers find interesting”. It’s a singular community with no knobs and yet it provides more diverse points of view than any given subreddit.
