Slashdot is happy to criticise Digg's approach, but for a long time /. was swamped by reposts and commenters still regularly criticise poor moderation decisions (grammatical mistakes, misrepresentation of articles, trollbait, blogspam) that /.'s moderation should be able to fix. Whatsmore, over time even /. has conceeded and accepted social contributions via Firehose.
I'm not sure either model is better than the other, frankly.
If you look at reddit, 11 of the 25 top posts right now are on politics. That's definitely not a balanced view of the news. Digg has 2 right now, but used to have way more.
They've obviously built great sites, but as many have already noted, it's not at all a great way to discover articles on a wide-range of subjects -- with reddit white labeling their structure, maybe some of the children they spawn will be able to even surpass the main site in real news sharing.
Honestly though, I don't know anybody not really computer savvy that uses any "social news" sites. Many people over 30 wouldn't even know what Digg is.
Really just an example of how people online all the time imagine the impact of what they use (aka twitter) to be greater than what it actually is.
people who are always connected are going to be controlling what the news is on those sites, and it definitely shows.
Ron Paul is a bad example. Like it or not, the fate of nations hangs on the presidential election, and so one Ron Paul link has a bit more importance than a million [PIC]s.
I'm not sure either model is better than the other, frankly.