Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Digg kneels before the Digger Mob
How social sites can fall victim to user-generated discontent ... (ha ha)
After a digger posted a story linking to the decryption key for HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray discs, Digg received a demand that the secret key be taken down from the site.
Digg CEO Jay Adelson wrote:
We’ve been notified by the owners of this intellectual property that they believe the posting of the encryption key infringes their intellectual property rights. In order to respect these rights and to comply with the law, we have removed postings of the key that have been brought to our attention.
From the moment when this story was effectively deleted, Diggers revolted - literally. They soon flooded Digg’s homepage with stories mentioning the decryption key. Users had taken over the site, and unless the management of the site massively deleted articles, there was not much that could be done.
In a later post, co-founder Kevin Rose posted Digg’s capitulation:
(...) 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.
Users had turned into a mob and had bullied their way through.
While there is an undeniable romantic revolutionary touch to this event, I can’t help thinking that it is nothing less than puerile vandalistic anarchism. Like spoilt kids who were spanked on the back on their hand for breaking the rules they had agreed to.
The users giveth, and the users taketh away.
