No, power to the people as a philosophically-organizing principle was quite popular around the time Digg was created. The idea is that the big problem with the world is that the control is all in the hands of $WRONG_GROUP and the correct solution is just to democratically hand all the power out to your userbase and it'll all just magically work because you've solved the underlying problem.
The error of this thinking was the downfall of Digg, and for another example, Third Voice. Also, numerous blog owners initially fell for the idea that removing comments from their site is "censorship" on par with how evil it is when governments do it, and this idea is still current, even though it's nothing more than a recipe for getting destroyed by trolls after a certain critical mass is obtained. Like I said, the right answer is something else entirely. It's a recurring cycle on the Internet; somebody decides power-to-the-people is the way to go, the problems become manifest, the community takes action to contain the damage or simply flames out entirely, and some idealistic group of people get pissed off, declare that the people are now powerless and it's time for power to the people, starting the cycle over again. I've watched at least 3 iterations of this over the past 10 years. We're due for another "power to the people" explosion which right now is most likely to manifest in the distributed-Facebook community.
