Anyone have any luck advertising there? I burned through gobs of adsense cash within a few hours with my Ad on the top of the home page most of the time and when you click on comments. I however did not get many clicks. I think most of my budget was probably eaten up by people just refreshing for new comments and never looking at the Ad. I would imagine that a home page article these days will not result in much traffic considering all the new sections and since it will likely not stay there long.
I don't think anybody will click on the ad's on digg. People like fasthosts just use it for branding.
It doesn't matter what you do on the web or any where else in the world. People try to make money all the time and alot of them don't really worry to much on how they make it and what they do to other peoples business/ sites to do this. Alot of sites get spammed and things, but sites that do get spammed find ways of dealing with it. At the end of the day, it is there business that is being affected and they will do something about it rather than see their profitable business just go down the pan.
Google are 10 times better at preventing spam than any other web organisation, so I dont know why you think google need to catch up to dig, it was google who worked out how to stop the spam and saved the internet in the first place