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You sir, have just solved my RSS problems. I can't believe that I didn't think of the simple brilliance of relying on shared items.
I essentially did something similar to your plan a few months ago, as you referenced (thanks BTW). What I've found is for certain subject areas, using human filters is a really good idea. You end up getting important stuff right away. However, it's sort of like switching from a scalar chart to a multiplier or even logarithmic chart -- if you have straight site feeds, important stuff barely stands out above other articles. When you use human filtering, the big articles get echoed like crazy! You end up seeing a lot of duplication of some stuff.
On the other end of the scale, stuff that isn't in the same subject area as your human filters gets ignored. So I've found that it is always good to subscribe to a site or two in the subject areas you are interested in to get that information too. Or, if you can find them, a subject matter expert you can use as a human filter.
I think augmenting your feed addicition with FriendFeed and Twitter is sweet if you can do it. It gives you a more rounded view of what's current out there, especially if you have a lot of friends/followers on those services.
All that posting a total stupid focus, it's like a dog chasing his tail. In general though I feel sorry for this years startups, we have had it with them because we overdid it last year (speaking for myself at least).
and trust, meaning, i trust that what i need is going to show up when i need it
For those of you in the same position (ie not a tech geek), there is an alternative approach to pruning RSS triffids; namely set up a different account in Bloglines or another aggregator and paste over the important base feeds from G Reader, then try that for a while, add or prune as necessary. Over a few weeks, you'll soon work out what is relevant or irrelevant and thus you can parse accordingly.
While doing this, I found lots of interesting stuff and ideas for new posts that got clipped to Evernote for future blogs, also improving my productivity.
The end result was the same, much reduced RSS feeds, but by a different route.
I've taken a different route on feeds post FriendFeed, which is to actually add more, although I do occasionally prune feeds as well. As one commenter notes, if you have interests outside of tech FF/shared items aren't going to provide for you. Besides, if we all follow each other without taking in from independent sources we also risk creating an echo chamber as well.
But I agree if everyone goes shared there wont be anyone to share the orginal :)
I think another issue is how you view your feed reader. It seems like many want minimal feeds so they can read all of their feeds daily. I don't view my feeds that way and could never read all of them each day. I have a daily folder, which I try to read, and then since I use Google Reader, I tend to view the feed reader as a sort of database. Since nothing is deleted, I use my feed reader to search for topics that I am interested in that day. For example, today I wanted information about the video game Mirror's Edge and was able to search the reader and obtain information back to when the first story about this game was published by one of my feeds. Since Google Reader doesn't tell you how many unread feeds you have once it is over 1000, I am guessing that I probably have 40,000 unread items. Occasionally, I delete a feed that no longer interests me but since I don't have the goal of zero items in my feed reader, I am perfectly happy to have too many feeds and too much information that I can search at a later time.
One technique that works well for me is using a "Testing" folder in my reader. When I find a new feed, I add it to the Testing folder and monitor it for a few weeks to see how relevant the info is to my needs, how often it's updated, etc. I'll then decide whether I want to keep it or dump it. If I keep it, I'll move it to an appropriate folder in my reader. I have My A-List folder (read daily) and several other folders for mom blogs, tech blogs, homeschooling blogs, and hobbies (read when I get time).