Over reliance on algorithms has degraded the user experience to the point that the average user is drowning in ragebait and extremist politics, because they drive up engagement. Just like a toddler, algorithms don’t discriminate between good and bad attention, so everything that gets clicks is thrust forward. Now, you could hope to train the algorithm to show you only postive things, but engagement is engagement and the algorithm curators often engage in rage farming, where your feed is injected with things that are likely to enrage you.
You can avoid this by installing an RSS reader, going to your favorite sites, and manually adding a RSS feed. Now, your reader has things that you manually selected, with the added bonus of having a content pipe free of malicious interference. You can also divide topics in a way that you can avoid certain themes and news until you decide to engage them.
This is how the Reddit “addicts” can get by without Reddit and help generate content elsewhere. Find an interesting article that you’d like to discuss or see other people’s opinion on in your RSS feed? Post it to kbin or Lemmy (or whatever you use).
I completely forgot RSS was a thing even though I’m kinda old. Just got the Feeder app on iOS and added a bunch of feeds I’m interested in. Now I can scroll through and it’s kinda like browsing Reddit but without the comments section.