It's a bit more nuanced than that. One of the social sites I briefly used counted clicks more then upvotes. Predictably, being a 30ysh year old male, I usualy clicked on links promising pictures of (more or less necked) women. In less then two weeks most of my personalized content was either porn or lolcats.
The moral of the story: while I do enjoy the ocasional porn and lolcat, it's definitely not what I want from the net (also why I didn't use the site for more then 2 weeks). It's just that it was much easier for their algorithm to categorize those things then the much more abstract "interesting", or even the somewhat less abstract "programming".
edit: It's not that social sites are doomed. It's just they're damn harder to get right then just digg, and they're still in infancy.
Yeah. I have high hopes for social sites. But it's why I prefer sites trying new models (like what Facebook was like before it went overboard) rather than sites that try to be "like Digg but for X."
problem 1: voting sites don't work, because they attract too many users
problem 2: subscription sites don't work, because they attract too few users
startup idea: a subscription voting site, with smallest possible monthly fee ($1 pcm?) - the purpose isn't to make money, but to limit users. Would probably work best for a vertical market or special interest group.
They give other reasons, but I wonder if it is also retaining the quality of the community. Also, they seem to use public bookmarkin ("favourites"), and not voting as such. Maybe that makes a difference.
