3. This one bugs me. It seems like smaller reddit type communities work best, but every social news site I've seen has only a few big feeds that the entire community has to use. I think the way to fix reddit/digg is to just open it up so anyone can create their own social news community, invite like-minded people (or not like-minded people, whatever they want), and have a mini-social-news site with stuff that interests everyone.
Then we could have social news sites follow kind of that same model that mailing lists and message boards and IRC channels do.
reddit has been saying for some time that they were going to allow user-created subreddits, but still haven't done it...