The Real Power of User Run Sites – The Digg Community Revolts
May 1, 2007 | Comments (5) | Filed under: General
If you are a regular visitor of the social news site Digg, then you might have witnessed an interesting chain of events take place today. It all started out pretty simple when someone posted an article on Digg containing the Processing Key for HD DVD. HD DVD is a sponsor of Digg and contacted them directly and told them to remove the story.
Rather than side with their extremely loyal user base and stick it to the man, Digg caved under huge sacks of cash and instead yanked the article. This did not sit very well with the Digg community at large who decided to rise up by promoting and writing literally hundreds of articles about both the incident and containing the key itself.
If you look at the site right now, every article on the front page has a reference to the code and every single story in the upcoming queue is more of the same. I thought this was extremely interesting in light of my previous article about members of the Digg community having the power to bury articles for no reason at all.
This entire incident, which by the way is far from over, just goes to show you the power the community wields in a community driven website. I wonder what the fallout of this entire incident will be? The real loser is HD DVD and Digg because if the key got exposure XXX being in the original article, it now has that to the 10,000th power with the full scale Digg revolt!
Update – 5 – 2 – 2007 (02:51 EST)
Well, it looks like the founder of Digg, Kevin Rose, has finally weighed in on this entire situation. From his response:
In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.
But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
To say the least, it looks like the Digg community succeeded in their goal. Honestly, I can see Digg’s side of the equation, worrying about getting shut down, but at the end of the day the cease and desist letter probably would have gone no where because there really was no basis for them to take any action. It is not like Digg posted a tutorial on how to compromise HD DVD security.
I’m now curious where this will leave Digg when all the dust settles. The entire Digg community is basically run by a handful of consistent contributers, and perhaps today’s events have shown them that Digg is not interested in going to bat for its community.
We’ll see where it all ends up!
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5 people have left comments
I wonder if he meant “as hands OFF as possible”
That seems to make more sense with the rest of his message.
My initial reaction to this (and I may completely change my mind later) is that Digg is in serious trouble. To choose to cater to the lunatic fringe and then “deal with whatever the consequences might be” is exactly the opposite of what I would have done. Now you’ve placated the people who make Digg a terrible place and put yourself in legal trouble. Had you stuck to your guns, on the other hand, you chase away the eighth-grade-mentality Diggers, freeing Digg to be a MUCH better site, and you keep yourself out of a major lawsuit
To choose to restore the HD-DVD based on the rationale that it’s what the users want — without regard to the legality — is insane. Now, this may all be a well-scripted plan to pretend that it’s all about the users, when you actually got advice from your lawyer that there was nothing to worry about. Still, I would have used this great opportunity to do an extreme purge of the ones who are the biggest threat to Digg actually going mainstream.
Yeah, I agree. A totally wasted opportunity to do a massive purge. I was actually talking with a friend of mine last night, after Kevin Rose responded, and we were thinking the same thing. Kevin’s response is probably perfectly crafted by the lawyers…
Despite the letter from Kevin Rose, Digg clearly gave in to a sponsor’s request. There was no “real” threat of getting shut down. As you pointed out, Digg didn’t write the post in question, Digg merely listed it as an article of interest to its community which was actually posted by a community member. I’m not sure if this statement applies…nevertheless, “Digg doesn’t write the news, they just report it.” Actually, I take that back…it should apply. I just saw CNBC cover this story on television, and while they didn’t make the key code available, lots of viewers now know it exists. Isn’t that just as bad as what Digg did? Why didn’t the HD DVD company tell CNBC to knock it off? Simple, they probably don’t buy ad time on that station. BTW: nice post.