Digg army challenging slashdot?

This post is one of the reasons that I rarely dig into the comments of Digg or Slashdot.  It is really unfortunate that a new blogger, with obviously a fantastic success rate (2 diggs in 10 days of blogging) would have this to say:

Too many peoples were just making comments for the sake of making a comment and hurt my feelings. I assume that this is very normal when many peoples see one article and there will always be some ones that will say “Hey I knew this… This is something very simple and is not worth anything”. I am sure that there are many peoples that are very good in Linux and even if my site is not intended for the first time Linux users, I would have not expected such reactions. Obviously a super Linux sysadmin has not much to learn from here (as probably from nowhere else, as he knows everything already, right?), but still… so much flame… So I have decided that for the time being I will no longer submit any of my articles to Digg, and just keep an eye on the site and get to learn more about it.

This commentary, though not coming from digg directly, has been repeated by Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch and other prominent bloggers. I guess I am just not a negative person. Who knows...but I don't really have the time to spend leaving snarky comments across the web.

A tangent to this would be the argument that is held up that organizations should open their comments and trackbacks to have open communication with their customers. I have often sided on this, however, I have never been in the position of a large organization that is faced with customers whose conversations are irrationally ill natured.  How would a very large organization deal with this and be able to handle the scale?  Yes, the marketplace is a conversation, but how does the organization scale it's communication and filtering to be able to communicate with real commentary and remove ill intended?

A visit to a site can be seen as an entire experience: design, content, media, etc. I would consider the comments to be an integral portion of the content. Would I my audience to endure the snarky comments that seem to get sprinkled about by so many? I laughed when Mena Trott first addressed this...but I am becoming more and more aware of it.