In the absence of a universal recommender system that acts on clustering effects, social networks and link aggregators like HN can really be the next best thing.

It looks like at one point, mozilla attempted to solve this with their context graph project as well as their acquisition of pocket. However, it does look like it has all the hallmarks of a technological solution to a societal problem. Solving the adverserial aspects as well as ethical concerns would require nothing short of a rethinking of how we use the web.

https://medium.com/firefox-context-graph/context-graph-its-t...

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Context_Graph