[nicklaforge]

Every 'news' site that comes to mind aggregates content in some way, and by your comments, you seem to be after news aggregation. On the other hand, I think the good news sites also have a sizable membership that shares a certain expertise. For Slashdot, it might have been Linux. For this site, it seems to be web start-ups. Yet, even people like me, with no overpowering interest in web start-up news (though I'll admit to having worked for one), still find a subset of the discussion of interest, and I'm sure this is a side effect of the high level of discourse.

My point here is that it's difficult to maintain that core membership purely through aggregation instead shared interests and expertise. In other words, the quality really comes from the people involved and not the technology for aggregating external links. For me, my go to discussion group was 9fans, which is pretty quiet these days. If I really wanted to find interesting things to talk about, I'd seek out those involved individuals, who of course haven't gone away, but just moved on to other things. I get the feeling that in the age of Twitter and Google Plus, news will become centered around people, and that aggregation sites will go the way of phpBB.