I fall in between your two opinions. There are tons of quality sites out there, but they take a little bit of effort to find. That effort seems to be just enough to bias postings on reddit, hubski, facebook and probably every other large social media site heavily in favor of a handful of massive sources. Just check how many top-rated submissions are from The Atlantic, HuffPo, The Guardian, BBC or PBS. There have been a few interesting posts in /r/TheoryOfReddit recently with stats to back this up. It takes a concerted effort on the part of an online community - or a good blocking feature, thank you hubski! - to keep from being flooded by the same news that's already getting exposure everywhere else.

Thanks. I've been posting a bunch of stuff from open access journals where you can get the PDF for free. Would it make for easier parsing to have a comment on each post linking straight to the PDF?

Re: comprehension, a lot of straight journal articles are going to be pretty dense, but my hope is that going straight to the source will cut out a lot of science journalism BS and expose some underappreciated stories. Hopefully the message of each article are reasonably accessible even if there are some hairy details.