Commenting on you and j_crick:

> That’s probably a chicken/egg problem, and I don’t know how I would even begin to untangle it if I were you.

Paywall half of the article so the reader gets an idea on whether or not they want to pay to read more. This would also encourage impulse purchases.

> Most of their job to start would be to build a regex list of article title structures which are overly cliched, so that those articles get de-merited by the recommender algorithm

Categorize articles. There's no need to make cliched articles impossible to find for the cliche-interested reader.