you either post or reblog stuff that comes up on your dash. to have more stuff show up follow more people. then people follow you. edit: it will absorb your life.
mine Search through tags of things you like, like weed for example. Then you get things to reblog, and can also discover blogs you like. Just click on lots of shit and you'll be happy in no time
followed. haha speaking of tags, the 'bong' tag cracks me up. people do the DUMBEST shit with their weed in this world.
saw a bunch of graffiti. instant follow lol. @darksmoker on your dash there is a search bar. use that. it searches tags. i dont use tags because im lazy but a lot of people do. then when people reblog stuff it shows up on your dash and you can go to the blogs that that person reblogged and follow them.
imho reddit is better because as you said, reddit is tumblr's source, so why not get stuff from the source ? also there is a sub reddit for pretty much anything you can think off, seriously. And yeah there are quite a lot of douchebags on reddit, but once you get past that its actually pretty cool. just my opinion though