[estacado]

The way I see it, what went wrong with Digg was the amount of influence "superstar" users had on the stories that make the front page. The fact that they kept and displayed the "ranking" of users just shows how this culture of superstardom is ingrained within Digg mechanics itself. It may not have effected the traffic or growth at the time, but it did affect the quality of stories highlighted. Digg knew its system was being gamed and I think that is what pushed them to make the changes they did on v4 (apart from the money), where publishers were given priority over individually submitted stories.