That's kind of the point. Yesterday Spolsky asked why Digg had 500 servers and less traffic than StackOverflow, yet StackOverflow had 5 servers.
False dichotomies huzzah!
False dichotomies huzzah!
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?
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.
And for the level of content, interactivity, media, etc etc, I can say that 500 is silly.
What sort of computing resources do you think it took for Google to develop the autopilot car? Would you have been able to determine that by looking at their homepage and the services they provide? No. That's the point. I'm not suggesting that Digg is doing anything so interesting, but most of those 500 servers are almost certainly NOT being used to support their website directly, they're being used by the business for other things.