It's a risk-reward scenario. When there wasn't as much content, the reward of finding a new blogger who would write about interesting things was worth the risk

It's a risk-reward scenario. When there wasn't as much content, the reward of finding a new blogger who would write about interesting things was worth the risk of reading boring tripe, because there weren't that many better options risk-reward wise. Now, the choice is either a) read something completely unknown, which is just as likely to obey Sturgeon's Law as anything else, or b) read something from The Stream, which has been pre-vetted, and hence is likely to be of higher perceived quality. Of course, the knock-on effect from that is that established writers and sites with an existing fanbase have a huge advantage, because they'll get into The Stream 100x as often. The second effect is that the headline becomes far more important than the article, because there are two reasons that people check out an article that isn't already in The Stream - either because they recognise the author, or because they're intrigued by the headline. (On FB, you can add "or the image is really interesting"). A somewhat bland article with a great headline will get more views 99% of the time than a great article with a bland headline, in our current ecosystem. That was always the case, but The Stream amplifies it considerably. The ongoing issues that Hacker News has with /new and actually enabling interesting content to bubble up is a microcosm of the larger issue. And if the HN team manage to solve those problems, that'll be a very, VERY interesting day...