What I think can improve the situation is "curation", particularly manual, effort-intensive, thoughtful and reasonably timely curation by a person or people with good taste. That's asking a lot, with many subjective variables, but it's what keeps bringing me back to Hacker News, the consistently high signal-to-noise ratio.
Yes, I think this is a good point – it certainly reflects how I find the things I value most. People I know or have come to "know" by following for years have always the best sources of information for me.
