Relevant to the topic, I've been moving towards MetaFilter lately as it doesn't suffer from this problem as much due to the design of the site, has the bonus of hand-moderation and the $5 entrance fee is a surprisingly good way of limiting membership. The flip side of this is that the content is a very mixed bag in terms of submission quality and topic due to the hugely different styles and interests of submitters - even more so than other social news sites. The comments there are often unparalleled in terms of quality, however, and Ask MeFi is an invaluable resource.
I poked around with Planets (blog aggregators on one topic) for a while but the amount of content is generally overbearing to make it impractical to read them for any great length of time.
I'm slowly but surely warming to the idea that old-style blogs that link to the other content may be a good idea but the question is finding a good ones that are regularly updated, whose moderation you can trust and whose interests align with yours. I do read Boing Boing, Ajaxian and Engadget who follow this format, but I think Slashdot has suffered from it over time by deviating from its core subject matter, has become a caricature of itself especially with regards to its biases and suffered from dumbing down over time. Of course, it's still an open problem as to where they get their content from and how they filter the good from the bad.
Perhaps the conclusion is that the whole concept of a link-driven news site is still largely an open problem - and I'm certainly not sure what the solution is.