Digg never seemed like the kind of company that was run by an engineering culture. It feels like a MySpace type of company, where they have good marketing / media people but not about the technology and platform. One thing that suggests this is that most of the early engineering talent has left [http://atomized.org/2010/08/they-can%E2%80%99t-go-back/] , which is not something you see at Google, Facebook, or even Reddit. The new CEO might benefit from turning this around to avoid disasters like v4.
I'm not sure I'd agree with this. Digg seems to be more sophisticated technology wise than pretty much any competing site. Besides some basic scalability issues and a few bugs when launching a new features, all these sites don't require much in terms of engineering. It's much more a question of content programming and community building. Reddit and Hacker News may look successful because of an engineering culture, but I'd wager that's more about having a strong identity than the site's underlying technology.
I doubt there's a correlation. Facebook is engineer-driven and was founded to solve a social problem. And the problem google solved was borderline social. Don't mean to be argumentative- I just think that it's a choice that leadership tends to make early on that's unrelated to the problem being solved, and that one of the two choices/cultures seems to do far better than the other. (could be confirmation bias, but I kind of doubt it).
