I'm not exactly trying to be snarky about this, but basically, there's a subset of content on HN that I actually care much about, what I'd describe as the hard facts and interesting invention components. I do want to read articles from totally disparate fields, but I don't give a damn about entrepreneurship and start-ups as a culture... usually. I want to read technical papers and reporting, I want blog posts on new frameworks and languages and robots, but I could happily dispense with the "My favorite language is better than your favorite language" posts. Simply put, the usual business of software is tiresome, but software and science are not. Is there an aggregator out there for me, momma?
No one cares about <i>all</i> of HN. We just all care about different subsets. If you want your perfect community, you need to find enough people who care about exactly the same subset of articles as you to support the community and convince them to become a part of it. Then you need to ruthlessly keep out anyone who has a slightly different subset, while making sure people don't leave the community or, for that matter, change their tastes.<p>Of course, your own tastes will change, so really you need to guide everyone else in the community to change their tastes right along with you so the community will continue to provide the aggregation you desire. Either that, or you'll have to convince or force old members to leave and new ones to come in that match your new interests.<p>In other words, you're asking for something which can't reasonably be expected to exist. The aggregator you want is <i>you</i>. Click on the articles that sound interesting. Ignore the ones that don't. You can't expect a community to perfectly support your personal, unique, and ever-changing tastes.
Maybe try using an RSS reader and over time build up the exact things you want to read. Eventually, you'll have a perfect feed of things that interest you (well, maybe not perfect, but close). Another option is Reddit, which has the ability to subscribe to specific groups that show up in your feed. It's community generated if you would prefer not to hassle with building an RSS feed library yourself. I find myself coming to HN for startup stuff and Reddit for more directed conversations about Python or Ubuntu since they are already filtered and show up when I'm logged in.
The displayed links show a user-chosen title (which, to be sure, is often less informative than the original article title) and a base URL for the source (which also is often confusing, especially for blogs or newsgroups hosted on the Google domain). That's enough information to guide my skimming of links to choose the links to read. If the duplicate submission detector worked better, I'd be even happier, but I find HN useful for finding what I like to read.
I browse through the titles of the news and read only those that are really of my interest. I cherrypick the news I read and I find a good think that not all the news are of my interest because I don't have enough time to read them all. Sometimes I find interesting articles on fields I wouldn't have researched on my own.
I recently reread "hot-tubbing an online community", a classic from 1999 (<a href="http://www.calebclark.org/?p=870" rel="nofollow">http://www.calebclark.org/?p=870</a>), which seems very relevant.