Market forces and boredom

Once upon a time, Slashdot was an excellent source of information about what is going on in the world of high tech. However, as the number of readers grew, they needed more money to keep the site running, and they had to rely on commercial interests.

Commercial interests want ad revenues, so they want even more readers. Unfortunately, you get more readers with heated discussions, and a discussion is rarely heated unless the subject is something a lot people already know enough to have an opinion on - in other words, it is old news.

Consequently, the "news" at Slashdot is often found in one of the following categories:

• Comparisons between two known systems (Operating systems, standards, ...)
• Provocative closed-ended questions about known subjects ("Is...?")
• Superlatives about known subjects (biggest..., smallest ever...)
• Lists about known subjects (top ten...)
• Scientific news from popular sources (Link to CNN or Yahoo News but never to Science or Nature)
  

If that is what they need to keep the site running, I do not mind. But could they not at least add a filter to remove dumbed down news?