You've inspired me for some reason to defend the site (I'll admit to bias, check my profile). Digg is very highly trafficked site, and the content might not be to the liking of the people here, but it started just like most of the companies that inspire everyone here that I've interacted with. Along the way it's done some cool stuff, created jobs for coders and inspired a raft of imitators.
Don't know why you inspired me to speak up.
And concerning the current problem, avoiding XSS and CSRF holes demand vigilance, especially with the many, many demands put on programmers at startups. Perhaps only with php, but I think programmers are often clever enough to work around almost any constraints, and sometimes they see security as a constraint. Digg always attracted users interested in proving their mettle by finding security holes, and as a result the developers are pretty vigilant about fixing holes.
Concerning the content of digg, well, it's an adventure ;-). As it's grown, it's left lots of room in its wake for other (maybe better) communities to develop.
Actually, thats not true. When a crowd operates according to certain constraints (see "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds) they don't promote status quo intelligence, but rather gather the knowledge of individuals composing the crowd.
Sure, but those constraints pretty much rule out most Web (2.0) apps, and certainly fail in the Digg case in the original post. (Cf. the "too imitative" heading in the link you provided.)
I believe John C Dvorak had this right: MS lacks direction. They should stop becoming Web 2.0 masters and instead focus on releasing a simple, effective, high-quality OS (which they've failed with since W2K/XP imo).
