Unfortunately this doesn't work well. Reddit works well because you can see the most upvoted posts of alltime/year/month/week/day, and it is extremely convenient and straightforward, it makes it super easy to discover the best content.

The tags only have "top stories", which is obscure, and looks like it works more like a "hot" sorting. I can't see the most upvoted stories to discover the best ones, and at the same time the "top story" in the tag I'm interested in hasn't changed in a long time.

I can neither browse the best stories of all time, nor the best stories published since the last time I've checked. So either way it's basically worthless.

Also, if I follow the popular tags, I'm afraid that the firehose of the new content published in them will bury the new stories published by people whom I explicitly decided to follow.

That is why should be a way to view the posts from the people I follow in the reverse-chronological order, and a completely separate system for discovering the most popular/upvoted posts. As in HN + RSS reader.