Jason Calacanis takes a pretty good shot at the lack of transparency for Digg in a post yesterday. There's some fair stuff here, and Jason notes that he founded (and then left) a competing site. It feels like it was just yesterday that Kevin Rose was on the cover of BusinessWeek as the current poster child of Web 2.0 mania, with some wildly off the mark assumptions on the value of his firm. Not that I think BW will go back and review what they had to say, but I bet they might have a different assessment now than they did a few months back.
My personal view is that sites that vote stories up or down have only limited value to readers. I look at Digg regularly, mostly as an easy way to see if there's something hot bubbling -- I cross check with techmeme and slashdot, if something is on all three sites, I should probably pay attention!
That said, what we're seeing on Digg is the same thing we've seen in every phase of internet expansion -- problems with signal to noise ratio. On Digg, there is increasingly more noise and less of value. Heck, just look at the comments on some of the stories -- if this is where the evolution of user generated is going, count me out.