I use an RSS reader as well, and I never added Digg just because of the "Firehose" effect; I just didn’t want to overflow my whole reader with crap headlines I knew I’d only care about 1/100 of. I feel this helps my obsession with trying to raise the level of discussion on the internet in that it keeps me off of those sites as much as possible.

I’ve always loved Slashdot - I’ve loved it so long that I have a 5-digit user ID. Not King Dork, but still not bad. I joined well before the year 2000.

Lately, in the past year or year-and-a-half, I’ve felt the Slashdot quality decline. I’ve had to set my Comment Score threshold at 3, and sometimes I even up it to 4. There are ENTIRELY too many terrible useless comments on that site. As a result I read less of the comments than I used to, but I still read the comments for a story in which I am interested. Sometimes when I see the headline in my RSS aggregator (more on that in a second) I’ll open the story just for the comments.

Digg and I don’t go far back at all - maybe just a few weeks. I was immediately attracted to it and then almost instantly repulsed. Everything I wanted - comment moderation, threaded conversations, “intelligent” discussion - NOT PRESENT. Okay, yeah, there is moderation but as you said no one truly uses it. The firehose analogy is indeed apt - there’s a ton of interesting stuff out there but god forbid you dare scroll down to the comments section. On Slashdot there are entirely too many useless comments. On Digg there is NOTHING BUT USELESS COMMENTS. EVER.

However, I never visit either of these sites directly. They both just pop up in my newsreader as headlines. If the headline is interesting I’ll open the link, often times not caring if it’s Slashdot or Digg (or Engadget or TUAW or whatever else dorky tech site is in my ‘Pseudo-news’ group). Then once the site is loaded the appropriate action - reading comments or desperately ignoring them - is taken.

I think I added nothing to this conversation.