As far as I can remember you can choose what updates you receive from different persons and you can also prioritize this by creating groups like "close friends",but as you said they can do better than this.
I have been less active since I lost my up voting (my fault,I had a few days when I up voted everything that hit the frontpage) and flag (no idea here) capabilities but there's no way I'm leaving hacker news.
I find more interesting content here than on any other site.You can probably configure reddit to get a similar output but it's not the same thing.
I actually came here to recommend i3-wm.
If you've never used a tiling window manager or used one but it didn't really work out,I suggest you give it a try.