This is exactly what I do.
I wrote a system that reads from multiple RSS feeds and screen scrapes non-rss sources into RSS feeds. Every article goes through some basic tagging before being indexed in a personal Elasticsearch instance and archived on-disk (my "personal Google").
Every morning I get an email with content filtered based on tags, prioritized based on my interests and upvotes (where applicable), and coarsely aggregated by theme (mostly for politics). I limit myself to 30 minutes of reading for each update, forcing myself to conscientiously prioritize. I occasionally click to the HN comments, but avoid Reddit like the plague.
Actionable articles get added to OmniFocus, but only if I will take action. Informative articles get added to Evernote, but only if I will reference them in the future.
It's imperfect, but still scratches that cave-man itch to constantly check the environment for new signals - I trust my software to do so on my behalf. Funneling content into action-items and references keeps me otherwise focused on doing things instead of reading things.
(I also abandoned Facebook/Twitter/etc because their mix of news/entertainment/communication was addictive - all I need is communication)
I've noticed that with hot-topic issues (like the Google memo), there's usually a flurry of divisive, and in my opinion uninformed and low-quality discussion over multiple submission, followed by (somewhat) more informed and reasonable discussion when the initial outrage dies down.
I wouldn't know what the best way to implement this would be, though. A community guideline? A 'too hot, let it cool down' button for users with a certain amount of karma? Active moderation?
My FB stream mostly consists of inane things that other people have clicked "like" on, and if FB thinks those are the things that interest me the most, they are failing big time.
That sounds a little arrogant, but is my general experience. I see this in the submissions and comments where HN demands thought out posts. Jokes or comments that do not contribute are rarely at the top and often removed, while the opposite is true of jokes on Reddit (in general)
The "avoid gratuitous negativity" policy has helped, but we are still very much in a place of "most negative opinion wins" which pushes some discussions way off of reality. And those are just the ones I know about.
Turns out that sounding smart or righteously indignant (or usually, both) doesn't make something correct. Just a weird rabbit hole of darkly gratifying negativity. I guess I'm waking up to the fact that our flavor of "discussing ideas" might not actually be that more high-minded than Reddit or Facebook.
Holy Usenet Batman.
This is exactly what I did when I had to pay per minute of dial up. Still ended up spending hours in front of a computer.
I have found that putting some friction in front of the unconscious "tabbing to timewasting site" habit is really useful while trying to get something done.
What would the adaptation for Hacker News or Reddit look like? For one thing, probably a controlled release of all new content in batches, so we get trained out of refreshing them all the time. To its credit, HN at least provides noprocrast.