They're kind of an evolutionary branch not taken. The nearest analog that comes to mind is Slashdot's system of taking submissions but having a small number of

They're kind of an evolutionary branch not taken. The nearest analog that comes to mind is Slashdot's system of taking submissions but having a small number of editors actually making the posts, which often synthesized different articles, so the discussion was about the story more than a specific link. That might have eventually popularized the kind of "reverse blog" you're talking about, but Blogger/MovableType made it a lot easier and normal to host your own blog, while vote-driven aggregators like Digg and Reddit took out the editorial aspect. Then we ground everything up into a slurry of "user-generated content" on centralized platforms...