In many ways, sites like Hacker News and reddit serve as democratized curators of quality content. If quality content is rewarded with high karma, this hopefully rewards more people to produce that content.
Even when a site like reddit gets bogged down in the low-form entertainment of the masses (which, admit it or not, we all comprise at some point in our days), the site itself forms a "bud" off the main branch with a return to quality [1].
In the end, I think we're both right. There's more writing than ever before (good), and there's worse writing than ever before (bad). We as a society must figure out not only how to do quality control in this new environment, but also to recognize when we're merely being snooty (in public, while laughing hilariously at inane facebook updates in private).
[1] see http://www.reddit.com/r/depthhub