Reddit is splitting its home feed into For You and Following, giving readers a more visible choice between discovering communities and catching up on the ones they joined. In its October 28, 2026 announcement, the company said the change would roll out globally over the following few weeks. It also promised to remember the last feed you viewed when you reopen Reddit.
For anyone who opens the app to check a few favorite communities, that remembered choice is the useful part. Following is the place to start. But choosing your communities, choosing the order of their posts, and switching off recommendations are separate controls.
How to get back to your subscribed communities
For You combines posts from communities you have joined with recommendations related to your interests. Following focuses on communities you have joined; Reddit’s October 8 changelog also includes users you explicitly follow in that feed. If your goal is to catch up with your usual discussions, select Following when the two tabs appear.
To make that your normal reading routine:
- Use the Reddit account whose community subscriptions you want to read.
- Select Following in the feed selector.
- Leave Following as the last feed you view before finishing your session.
Reddit describes this as remembering your last selection. If you explore For You afterward, switch back to Following before leaving when you want Following to be your next starting point. The announcement does not describe a separate permanent default-feed switch or promise that the preference synchronizes between devices.
This builds on an earlier test. Reddit’s September 10 changelog says it relaunched the experiment on September 2 after revising it in response to feedback. That revision specifically promised to reopen Following after a session ended there, regardless of how much time had passed. October’s news is the wider rollout of that approach.
Why your iPhone, Android phone, or browser may look different
The preceding experiment covered iOS, Android, and reddit.com, according to the October changelog. The global announcement gives no minimum app build, country-by-country timetable, or firm completion date. As of October 30, the rollout window was still in progress. Updating the app should not be treated as a guaranteed way to make the tabs appear immediately.
Account state matters, too. Reddit’s explanation of content recommendations distinguishes the personalized, signed-in home feed from the Popular feed shown by default to signed-out visitors. Check that you are using the account with your subscriptions before comparing what appears on your phone and in a browser.
Switching to the app’s Incognito mode does not preserve that subscribed-community experience: Reddit says account-dependent features, including your signed-in home feed, are unavailable there. Incognito serves a different purpose, keeping that session’s activity from influencing your regular account.
The feed announcement specifies no Premium requirement. Ad removal is a separate matter: Reddit Premium includes ad-free browsing. Choosing Following does not make browsing ad-free.
What happened to the switch for turning off recommendations?
If you remember disabling recommendations in Settings, the new layout can be confusing. During the earlier experiment, a June 11 Reddit administrator update said participating accounts had lost the home-feed recommendations switch because Following provided the dedicated feed for their subscriptions. That explains why older instructions may point to a control you cannot find.
Reddit’s Help Center still documents the home-feed switch. If it is present on your account, these are the documented locations:
- iOS: Open your profile using your avatar, open the three-line menu near the upper right, then choose Settings and your username under Account Settings. Under Privacy, turn off Show recommendations in home feed, as described in the iOS app FAQ.
- Android: Open your profile using your avatar, then the three-line menu and Settings. Under General, open Account settings for your username. The Android app FAQ calls the switch under Privacy Enable home feed recommendations; turn it off to disable them.
- reddit.com: In Preferences, turn off Show recommendations in home feed. This is the route in Reddit’s home-feed recommendations guide.
The switch applies to home-feed recommendations. Reddit does not describe it as a way to remove the For You tab or turn off recommendations everywhere in the service. If your account has the new tabs but no recommendation switch, Following is the feed Reddit directs you to use for subscribed content.
Following does not automatically mean newest first
A feed can contain communities you chose and still rank their posts. Reddit describes Best as personalized sorting, using signals from your activity. Selecting Following determines where the posts come from. Check the sort separately if you want to read them newest first.
Sorting has also been part of the experiment. Reddit’s October 8 changelog said it was still testing sorting and swiping. Check the menu in your own feed; Hot or Top should not be assumed available across accounts. If your Following view offers New, choose it when recency is your priority.
On iOS and Android, Reddit also documents a Latest feed that sorts followed-community content by New. Its navigation guide, updated October 28, places Latest in the three-line menu near the upper left of Home. If Latest is available in your layout, it is another route for checking fresh posts. The guide does not list an equivalent Latest entry for desktop navigation.
How to improve recommendations when you do want discovery
For You can be useful when you want to find another community around an interest. Reddit says its recommendations consider visits, votes, time spent in communities, subscriptions, and feedback. It also says newer accounts and accounts with fewer subscriptions may receive a greater emphasis on recommendations. That helps explain why an account with few subscriptions can feel more like a discovery feed.
When a recommendation misses, use the controls that are available on that post. Reddit’s community-muting guide documents Show fewer posts like this in a recommended post’s overflow menu. For a community you specifically want to exclude, open its community page, open the overflow menu, and choose Mute r/[community name].
Reddit documents muting for notifications, Home recommendations, and Popular on the apps and website. Its scope is those surfaces, rather than a guarantee that the community disappears everywhere. This is useful when you like discovering new discussions but want one particular source out of the mix.
If Following still shows suggestions, try a custom feed
During testing, Reddit identified an exception for people who followed only a handful of communities. In an October 8 administrator update about the experiment, Reddit said Following could show recommendations after a user ran out of new content from a very small subscription list. The October 28 announcement describes Following as joined-community content only, without explicitly explaining what happens to that earlier exception.
If you encounter it during the transition, Reddit’s suggested workaround was a custom feed containing the communities you want. This also suits a narrower reading habit: perhaps you want your local community and two hobby groups together, without including every other subreddit you have joined.
According to Reddit’s custom-feed instructions, on iOS or Android you open the upper-left navigation menu, scroll to Custom Feeds, create a named feed, then search for and add communities. Custom feeds can be private or public. On reddit.com, start from a community’s details menu, select Add To Custom Feed, create or choose the feed, and add the community.
A custom feed takes a little setup because you choose its contents yourself. Following is the quicker option for your regular subscriptions; Latest, where available, addresses newest-first reading; a custom feed gives a smaller set of communities its own place. Choose the one that matches what you came to Reddit to read.