I'm fairly convinced that much of the "cool factor" for a site like Digg is akin to high school style cliques. Digg has been "the" place to go for crowdsourced stories; now it looks like a new site, Mixx, is getting to the the "it" site. From Vandelay Design (by way of TechCrunch):

Unlike 99% of the other Digg clones, I think Mixx has a real chance for success…Mixx has a much more positive audience than Digg. It always amazes me that even the most popular and highest quality articles can get so many negative and unnecessarily degrading comments on Digg. So far the users of Mixx have proven to be quite a bit more pleasant, something that I know will be welcomed by most users.

That will last until Mixx gets bigger - like any internet resource, a large volume of users just about guarantees that the crap will follow. Just look at the more active usenet groups for an older example of this dynamic at work.

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