How to Change What Appears on Your Reddit Feed
Joining and leaving communities is the blunt control. Three subtler ones do more.
Here's how to change what appears on your Reddit feed: join or leave communities, mute the ones you want to keep but not see, switch the selector at the top between Home, Popular, Latest and custom feeds, and edit your topic preferences in Settings, or turn recommendations off entirely with the Show recommendations in home feed toggle.
In order of how much they change things:
Join and leave communities. Your home feed is built mostly from what you have joined, so this is the main lever.
Mute a subreddit you cannot leave or do not want to leave, which removes it from the feed while keeping access.
Switch the feed itself — the selector at the top offers Home, Popular, Latest and your custom feeds, and they are genuinely different sources rather than sort orders.
And adjust topic preferences in Settings, which is what drives the recommended posts from communities you never joined.
If you post as well as read, the same feed decides who sees your work, and the first thing a reader notices next to a post is its score. Reddit upvotes add to that public score on a post you choose; where Reddit then places the post is still up to Reddit and the community's own voters.
The recommendations are the part most people are really asking about, and they are controlled somewhere unexpected.
Reddit's home feed is no longer only your subscriptions. It includes posts from communities you have not joined, chosen from your activity and from topics Reddit has inferred you care about.
Those inferences are editable. In Settings, under the account preferences, there is a section for topics and interests where Reddit lists what it thinks you are interested in, and each can be turned off. On the apps it sits under a heading like Manage Topics or Content Preferences.
That screen is where somebody who keeps seeing sports posts despite never having joined a sports community goes to stop it, and almost nobody knows it exists.
The second thing in the same area is mature content and the various filters, which also shape what the feed will serve.
And the third control is per-post: the three-dot menu on anything in the feed offers to show fewer posts like this, and to hide the community entirely. Used a handful of times on the same subject it is faster than any settings screen.
None of these turns recommendations off completely, but one setting does. As of October 2026, Reddit's preferences include a toggle labelled Show recommendations in home feed; switching it off removes the machine-picked posts from communities you never joined, and Home goes back to being built from your subscriptions. Ads still appear either way. A custom feed remains the stricter option, since it contains exactly the communities you put in it and nothing else.
The feed selector at the top
Home is your subscriptions plus recommendations, ranked.
Popular is what is busy across Reddit generally, ignoring your subscriptions. Latest is chronological from your communities, which is the closest thing to an unfiltered view.
Custom feeds, which Reddit also calls multireddits, are lists of communities you assemble. A custom feed shows those and only those, with no recommendations mixed in.
For anybody who wants their old subscription-only feed back, the recommendations toggle described below is the quick answer, and a custom feed containing their subscriptions is the strict one; it can be set as a bookmark or pinned.
The switch that removes recommended posts
Reddit's own help center documents a single toggle for the recommendation half of the feed: Show recommendations in home feed.
On the web, open Settings from your avatar menu and look under Preferences. On the iOS and Android apps, open your account settings; Reddit has moved the toggle between sections over the years, and the help center currently places it in the privacy area. Searching the settings screen for the word recommendations is the fastest way to find it on any version.
Turn it off and the Best sort on Home stops mixing in posts that Reddit's models chose for you. What remains is ranked posts from the communities you joined, plus ads.
It does not change Popular, which is Reddit-wide by design, and it does not unsubscribe you from anything. If you switch it back on later, the topic preferences described below go back to shaping what gets mixed in.
For people who joined a few communities and found their feed taken over by posts from elsewhere, this toggle is usually the whole fix, and it takes ten seconds.
Muting a community
Muting removes a subreddit's posts from your home feed without leaving it.
On the apps it is in the community's own menu. On the web it is available from the three-dot menu on a post or on the community page.
This is the right tool for a community you want to visit occasionally but not read daily, and for ones you have to stay in for other reasons.
The muted list is manageable in settings, which matters because muting something and forgetting is how people conclude a community went quiet.
Topic preferences
In Settings, look for the section covering topics, interests or content preferences — the label differs between the web and the apps.
Reddit lists the topics it has inferred and lets you remove them. Removing one stops recommendations drawn from it.
This is the only control over the recommendation half of the feed that works at the category level rather than one post at a time.
It does not clear your history. Reddit continues learning from what you open, so the inferred list repopulates over time.
Per-post controls
The three-dot menu on any post in the feed offers to hide it, to show fewer posts like it, and to hide the community.
These are the strongest signals available and they act immediately.
Hiding the community from the feed is close to muting and is reachable without leaving the feed, which makes it the one most people actually use.
Using them consistently on one subject reshapes the feed within days, considerably faster than editing settings.
The vote arrows work differently from these controls. An upvote or downvote changes the post's score for everyone, and what that score really shows, given that Reddit fuzzes it, is covered in how to see upvotes on Reddit.
Why the feed changed in the first place
A subscription feed only works if you have subscribed to enough active communities, and most accounts have not.
Recommendations exist because a new user with four subscriptions has an empty feed, and an empty feed is an account that does not come back. Every platform has made the same move for the same reason.
The cost falls on established users, whose carefully curated subscriptions are diluted by material they did not choose.
The recommendations toggle and the custom feed are the concessions to them, and the custom feed is the only place on Reddit where you still get exactly what you asked for and nothing else. The reason Reddit is organized around communities rather than people in the first place is laid out in is Reddit social media.
For posters, the shift cuts the other way: a post can now land in the feeds of people who never joined its community, and the score beside it is the first thing those strangers read. Upvotes on a Reddit post raise that visible number, nothing more, and every Reddit service is listed on the Reddit page.
Questions people ask about the Reddit feed
Why am I seeing communities I never joined?
The home feed mixes recommendations with your subscriptions. You can switch them off with the Show recommendations in home feed toggle, or trim them by topic in Settings under topics or content preferences.
Can I get a subscriptions-only feed?
Close to it. Turning off Show recommendations in home feed leaves Home built from your communities plus ads. A custom feed is stricter: it shows only the communities you add, with nothing mixed in.
What is the difference between muting and leaving?
Muting removes a community's posts from your feed while keeping your membership and access. Leaving removes both.
What does Latest show?
Chronological posts from your communities, without ranking or recommendations. It is the closest thing to an unfiltered subscription view.
Do the show-fewer-posts controls work?
Yes, and faster than settings. Used consistently on one subject they reshape the feed within days.
Why do removed topics come back?
Reddit keeps learning from what you open, so the inferred topic list repopulates. Removing a topic stops current recommendations, not future inference.
Keep reading
- upvotes on a Reddit post — Whether a post reaches anybody's feed is decided by its first hour of votes, and upvotes on a Reddit post acts in that window.
- why Reddit works by subject rather than by person — The feed behaves the way it does because of how the platform is organized, and why Reddit works by subject rather than by person explains it.
- what the vote counts actually show — The numbers are fuzzed deliberately, and what the vote counts actually show covers how much.