Last week I spoke on the manipulation of Digg, or rather the misusing of Digg to become popular. I was most certainly not the only one - but the discussion has gone far and eventually led to changes :

Changes are coming to our top users page as well. In the near future you will see two tabs - 'Top Diggers' and 'Top Submitters'. Top diggers will be a ranked list of people that find/digg (not submit) stories that become popular. This list will also be sorted by how diverse the digger is - meaning if they digg stories from lots of different people and their stories become popular, they'll rank highly. (Kevin Rose)

You can see a nice overview of how Digg is played here.
According to Wired's Monkey Bites, many Digg users have moved away to other Social Networking sites. Digg's blog is promising, it sounds to me as they are willing to do anything to protect the democracy of Digg. We'll see where all this leads....