If you’re dumb, then so am I. Like everyone else here, when I ran into that problem, I abandoned the new reddit for old.reddit.
It helps to realize that you’re not really their target audience. The goal is to keep reddit users on reddit for as long as possible. Counterintuitively, one way to do that is to stuff the screen full of seemingly unrelated stuff, because most people are there to see unrelated stuff. They’re not there to read a comment thread in full. In fact, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that 90% of traffic doesn’t read comments at all, most of the time.
It helps to realize that you’re not really their target audience. The goal is to keep reddit users on reddit for as long as possible. Counterintuitively, one way to do that is to stuff the screen full of seemingly unrelated stuff, because most people are there to see unrelated stuff. They’re not there to read a comment thread in full. In fact, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that 90% of traffic doesn’t read comments at all, most of the time.