Enter my idea: http://con.nect.us/. It's currently under development (it's my senior project at my university) and will be finished by December. My advisor is Tim Davis (http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~davis/), the brilliant man who wrote many of MATLAB's sparse matrix libraries, so I have an excellent mind to tap to help me solve my linear algebra problems.
It goes like this: con.nect.us will track user activity across many different websites, linking your username on reddit or digg or wherever with your account on con.nect.us, as well as take submissions for news itself. It then analyzes what people like and how people are similar to each other and recommend new content accordingly. Hopefully this will help us avoid the curse of the least-common-denominator and start to experience the web better.
If you want to be informed of future developments, there's an email submission form on http://con.nect.us/
Also, the name isn't finalized, so if you think you have a better one, please send it my way.
Sure, you can go and read a story and then remember to come back and vote, but it doesn't usually work that way. The upvote button is there, the title is there - most people are going to be making the vote at that stage, not after.
The rest of Mefi doesn't really interest me. I occasionally look at the front page, but it seems like it's a site for English majors that want to argue about typefaces. For technology-related stuff, news.yc meets my needs.
For random internet humor, I read the comments section in programming.reddit. There is some hilarious stuff there. It's sad that in a year or two, those commenters will be here :(
Relevant to the topic, I've been moving towards MetaFilter lately as it doesn't suffer from this problem as much due to the design of the site, has the bonus of hand-moderation and the $5 entrance fee is a surprisingly good way of limiting membership. The flip side of this is that the content is a very mixed bag in terms of submission quality and topic due to the hugely different styles and interests of submitters - even more so than other social news sites. The comments there are often unparalleled in terms of quality, however, and Ask MeFi is an invaluable resource.
I poked around with Planets (blog aggregators on one topic) for a while but the amount of content is generally overbearing to make it impractical to read them for any great length of time.
I'm slowly but surely warming to the idea that old-style blogs that link to the other content may be a good idea but the question is finding a good ones that are regularly updated, whose moderation you can trust and whose interests align with yours. I do read Boing Boing, Ajaxian and Engadget who follow this format, but I think Slashdot has suffered from it over time by deviating from its core subject matter, has become a caricature of itself especially with regards to its biases and suffered from dumbing down over time. Of course, it's still an open problem as to where they get their content from and how they filter the good from the bad.
Perhaps the conclusion is that the whole concept of a link-driven news site is still largely an open problem - and I'm certainly not sure what the solution is.