Sites like these mitigate some of the problems with news but they make others worse. A good comment thread can provide a lot of valuable background and context, for example. On the other hand, the bias towards unimportant but attention-grabbing stories is not especially improved by making editorial decisions with a literal popularity contest.

Me too. But it would be nice if news aggregator sites let you opt out of if it bleeds it leads (given the responses here, there's a market). It's certainly within the limits of the filters they use already for personalization bubbles.

I wrote a script for my local newspaper to spider links from their front page and display the city next to the "read more" links, so I knew if a catastrophe was local or national. If it's national then the wtf improbability goes down and it should be less interesting.