I've currently been working on this as a side project when I have time. It's still in early infancy, but my plan is to try to innovate in lots of those areas. Specifically by not implementing complex algorithms for ranking or filtering and instead building a complete user-suite of preferences that individuals can fine-tune. The other portion is to change the news feed to be a single source at a time, forcing users to focus on one thing at once and avoid infinite headline scroll.

Like I said, it's still early, but I'd love to hear other people's thoughts.