Kevin Rose was famous and pitched the site hard. The community started going downhill very early on.

Except that he didn't pitch the site hard at all for the first nine months (in fact he repeatedly denied being involved with it). And he wasn't all that famous (host of a dying show on a dying network). It was only after the VC money arrived that that started.

I'm obviously not going to argue with you over the history of digg, of course you're intimately familiar with that, but I felt like I got there pretty early, and I only personally got a couple of month's worth out of it before I felt it was overrun.

And I didn't mean to imply that he was actually famous, but he was certainly well-enough known among the target audience that having his name attached made a significant difference.

Actually I'd love to argue with you - my memory is not perfect, and I'd love to hear other people's perceptions. What point in time were those couple of months?