I've come to understand that sensationalist headlines like this one, "X is dead", actually mean "X is no longer interesting", once you take out the sensationalism. Even pg is guilty of this: http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
If his essay was titled, "Microsoft is no longer interesting", would anybody still read it? We all know Microsoft is no longer interesting. But if you say 'dead', you can write an essay explaining WHY something is no longer interesting and still have everyone reading. Good job.
Let's keep some perspective - Digg almost sold for $200,000,000 a couple days ago. Maybe they have some problems but it is still a very valuable site with lots of happy users.
Despite my love for higher level discourse, both YouTube and Digg are doing fine without it. You don't die when the average vocal user is rude online. That's almost the definition of mainstream.
Look at World of Warcraft (WOW) vs most other mmog's, the language used by an average WOW user is much more coarse, yet WOW decimates other mmo's for subscription rates.
I stopped being a happy user a hell of a long time ago. Why do I like Hacker News? Because I have a snowball's chance in hell of people in the community reading my occasional submissions or answering questions I might pose. The last time I got a front-page story on Digg was 2005 when I posted about some dude faking a story about him giving out Ubuntu cd's at a McDonalds.
I'd say it's more that the smaller the community, the greater the chance that the community as a whole can agree on what constitutes signal and what constitutes noise.
No, it's that Digg was designed in a way that couldn't scale. There was no method available to keep it going with a larger community. The growing communities that aren't ready to grow - they're the ones doomed to die.
200mm was fair for a site with 50mm uniques, msft currently has the text ad deal with digg, wonder if that was a major factor. i dont buy the :lack of culture line...
If his essay was titled, "Microsoft is no longer interesting", would anybody still read it? We all know Microsoft is no longer interesting. But if you say 'dead', you can write an essay explaining WHY something is no longer interesting and still have everyone reading. Good job.