Most things written for the web are written to get page views. Whenever a social news site gets big enough, then people will start submitting content to it for that purpose. That's where the money is. If a blog posts an article about Apple violating court rulings, boom, lots of traffic and ad money for little to no research costs, even if it isn't really anything worthwhile for programmers to read. You could always look for some other source of articles to read, such as following your coworkers on Twitter or Yammer or something, or curating your own set of RSS feeds of programming blogs, etc..
Absolutely, you're right. And that's what I'm doing. I'm using a machine curation service that is in beta. Unfortunately it's little more than a "subscribe to several RSS feeds at once by expressing an interest in a general topic"... but I think that's the direction to go.
