I'm a bit late, but maybe somebody else is still confused and would benefit…

You know this Stack thing here? Reddit is composed of thousands of "subreddits", each of which works pretty much exactly like the Stack, but each subreddit has a name and topic area, as well as its own moderators (who are not elected or anything—they're just whoever created the subreddit and whoever they appoint). There are other sort options than chronological; "hot" is the default, and it takes into account the voting on the posts, such that posts that are both recent and highly upvoted appear at the top.

You can subscribe to subreddits you're interested in, which means posts from them will show up on your frontpage (the page you see when you go to just reddit.com, not reddit.com/r/subreddit_name). I see /r/electronics has already been suggested, among others. To search for subreddits to join, you can use reddit.com/subreddits. (In addition to the frontpage, there's also /r/all, a pseudo-subreddit that shows posts from all subreddits.) As well as just about every imaginable 'safe for work' topic, there are a great many subreddits dedicated to different kinds of porn, so be aware of that if you're going to click on random subreddit links in public.

Reddit suffers from colossal mismanagement by the actual company that runs it (whose employees are known as "admins" onsite), but is still by far the most successful all-topics forum and link aggregator website. (A big complaint I see from other Redditors is that the admins ban subreddits for getting in the news in a way that looks bad on the site, even if they're healthy, and for just about no other reason ever.)

The votes you get on your posts and comments get added up (though I don't think linearly) to form your "karma" score. Karma doesn't do much of anything, but you can look at another user's karma numbers to get an idea of how active and popular they are. While you're on their profile, you can also see all of their past posts and comments. Also, on Reddit, there's no comment depth limit like there is here, and comments can also be sorted in various ways other than chronologically, similarly to posts.

Finally, there's a browser extension called Reddit Enhancement Suite (whose subreddit is /r/enhancement) that adds all sorts of power user features such as keyboard navigation.

I loved reddit until the whiny frightened hoplophobes took over. I dumped it and haven't been back. 

When would you say that happened? I haven't noticed such a change—I still see lots of people defending (reasonable) gun ownership.

divided into different sections called subreddits. So the section for lifehacks is r/lifehacks or reddit.com/r/lifehacks. You subscribe to the subreddit you like and unsub that you don't like . By default you are subscribed to load of crap subreddits, like worldnews.

Here are a few subreddits (forums) to get you started:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gadgets/

https://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/

https://www.reddit.com/r/PrintedCircuitBoard/

The magic is in the subreddits. With these you gradually tune it to your interests.

That's what I'd've thought, a bit like a filesystem directory-structure... 

Guess I didn't do it right.

You are not supposed to browse. You are supposed to consume the stream.

plankton!

Are you a fan of Captain Haddock? ;)

"... and fish and sea greens and protein from the sea"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiyPqbyHXIg

"You are supposed to consume the stream".

You´re so right!

The same with Blogs....total nonsense when you want to browse and recherche