you've got articles that have rating, you've comments to those articles that have rating, articles and comments are sorted according to rating, people earn karma from posting good comments / articles, everything has tags.
So personally I don't see a false dichotomy; even if Digg is more dynamic / complex ... WTF are they doing with those 500 servers?
Digg is more like Facebook and Twitter than StackOverflow. Each of Digg's logged in users gets their own "News Feed" based on the users they follow/friended/are most similar to.
StackOverflow on the other hand is much simpler - questions and responses, plus users and voting. AFAIK there's no collaborative filtering going on at SO, be it user or item based.
I don't know why Digg needs so many boxen, but I did find Spolsky's comparison disingenuous.
you've got articles that have rating, you've comments to those articles that have rating, articles and comments are sorted according to rating, people earn karma from posting good comments / articles, everything has tags.
So personally I don't see a false dichotomy; even if Digg is more dynamic / complex ... WTF are they doing with those 500 servers?