I hear you about "links are blue" ... except when you are a link aggregator.

The links are blue design from early HTML was meant to highlight links in the context of a paragraph of prose, not a list of link items. "Blue" means something special about the text in the context of the text around it.

In this case, the blue font is distracting because the links are the content. You don't need the blue to help your links "stand out". Because the links are normal text, using a normal palette would be appropriate.

I don't mind some subtle clues that these are links. Underlines, slight grey text. Or even a subtle hover effect. Two cents.

Put the number of occurrences (I assume that's the # at the end) first to help with signal to noise ratio based on quantity of coverage maybe? I'd also take a look at news minimalist if I were you, and how they used significance scoring as a fill in vs upvotes to provide additional signal: https://www.newsminimalist.com/

It's quite scannable, but obviously you're doing reverse chrono order so up to you how best to solve the UI issue.

Some additional feedback:

There's no reason for both the story count and the story summary to be clickable. It's confusing because:

(a) It's not clear what the number in parentheses even means (until you click and infer)

(b) Separate links makes you think they lead to different pages

Also, echoing another comment, it's not really clear what "incoming" and "outgoing" stories mean. Maybe "new" vs. "stale"?

Better, to be honest. Keep refining of course. But this is definitely more readable.

I admit that straight black is not quite the right answer either. A slightly toned down dark grey would be nice. And again, subjectively, I like how HN has a row of non-link smaller (lighter shaded) text under each listing, which I think plays nice for the white space between each item.