A Danger of What's New Type Sites

I've been using over a couple of months now these What's New type sites like digg, reddit, and shoutwire, among many others. I've noticed symptoms that the sites have been hacked mildly by people who seem to know how to work the system and artificially inflate their news item to the top. It occurs to me now, however, that there is a risk with this sort of thing. Now the bad guys with their quasi-news sites who have viruses sitting, ready to go on them, can elevate their stats by hacking places like reddit. They can increase the risk of their infections by "spreading them through digg" for instance. Therefore, the takeaway from this is that you need to watch what you click, always backup your system every day, virus scan your system, service pack it as soon as possible, use Firefox instead of IE, and ensure you're on the latest Firefox, watch your kids' usage and what they download and click on (even using a third-party product if you have to), use one or more firewalls, and do almost anything you can to avoid getting hacked by someone who's got their trick site sitting with high stats on What's New type sites.