Are we really believing that Digg is the unsurpassable pinnacle of social news?

Before Google came along, the search space looked pretty mature with plenty of entrenched players.

I would think its not that Digg is the pinnacle that these sites can be, but that social news sites are not usually defined by their features-even if a new social news site makes tons of improvements over the digg/reddit model, it simply won't have the user base that digg does. No one wants to use a social news site that no one else uses. Whereas with search, it doesn't really matter that no one else uses it because search isn't about other people.

Don't knock him for that. What have you built?

if its not a digg clone, you can start marketing it by not describing it as having the same metrics of a digg clone.

how is it different?

I'd lose the digg color scheme though. It's very much reminiscent of digg.

If you could solve the problems of 1) users reposting the popular links from other social sites (without attribution), 2) spam bots, or 3) a ruling clique from taking over the front page, then you could compete with Digg and probably beat them.