Mob Rule at Digg Nation

Digg, which is a user driven social content website, faced a user revolt that it couldn't contain or control over the past two days. Long story short, some users started posting some quasi-legal / illegal information about how to get around HD-DVD encryption. Digg management, fearing a lawsuit, deleted the posts. More posts came with the same info. More posts were deleted. Their CEO posted to the Digg blog and said,

"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."

That only go the users even more fired up and they rose up to make sure that EVERY single post was about this topic. As this is how the site works (users post information that they find interesting - like how delicious does bookmarks - and other users then link to it, comment, etc), management couldn't do anything except either suspend EVERY active account or take the site down, neither of which were viable options in their opinion.

So, today co-founder Kevin Rose posted on the Digg blog, effectively capitulating to the mob’s demands: He wrote,

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.

Let this be a lesson to any community based / social networking type site out there, especially if your audience is comprised of IT gurus. You live by the sword, you die by the sword. I love it!

Read more after the jump.

To say what happened today on Digg was a “user revolt” is an understatement. The Digg team deleted a story that linked to the decryption key for HD DVDs after receiving a take down demand and all hell broke loose. More stories appeared and were deleted, and users posting the stories were suspended.

That just got the Digg community fired up, and soon the entire Digg home page was filled with stories containing the decryption key. The users had taken control of the site, and unless Digg went into wholesale deletion mode and suspended a large portion of their users, there was absolutely nothing they could do to stop it.

Digg CEO Jay Adelson responded on the Digg blog earlier this afternoon but it was clear he did not yet understand the chaos that was coming. The post only added fuel to the fire. Just now, co-founder Kevin Rose posted yet again on the Digg blog, effectively capitulating to the mob’s demands: He says

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.

Until today, it seems, even Digg didn’t fully understand the power of its community to determine what is “news.” I think the community made their point crystal clear.

Vive La Revolution.

Posted by Jefe at 2:28 PM, filed under tech