This is very true.

To give an an example, in the front page of hacker news I only see what is boiling i.e what caught the attention of the masses. I hardly learn new stuff. I think this is true for any crowd-based news site rating system.

In contrast, when I open up my RSS reader and see posts of the blogs I subscribed to, I often learn new things that perhaps were simply not very interesting to the common HN in the same period of time, but are enriching to my general or technical knowledge.

The idea is to accumulate 300 or so low-frequency blogs, so that each day you would have a few posts to read from interesting people. Low frequency is good because the signal-to-noise ratio is often better.