Everyone's pretty skeptical here, but I think something like this is the way forward. Not based on Reddit or HN, of course, but based on the same principle, namely, user curation. It's argued that Google was so successful at first with PageRank because at the time it was common for users to have personal web pages that had long lists of curated links to other websites. That signal has gone down the toilet, but why can't we just skip the middleman and get people to rank sites they think are interesting by, you know, upvoting them or something like that. We need collaborative filtering for content aggregation.