False dichotomy. They're both aggregators per se, but one top-down curates breaking news (and reactions to it, which is why a story may take up so much space), the other uses voting to optimize news of any age to the interest level of a community.

I don't disagree with Fred's conclusion - that Techmeme is hard to take sometimes - but that seems more a reflection of the quasi-autistic and frequently hysterical focus of the tech media these days.