Ellis Live

The whole Web 2.0, social community thing just hit a big reality check over at Digg.com. If you don’ t know digg, it’s a social website that allows users to vote content up and down. Only stuff way up shows up on the front page. Even comments from users can be voted up and down. Well, a little while ago, someone got hold of the HD-DVD key (the digital key that allows decryption of HD-DVD movies and posted it. Shortly after that, the site descended into anarchy. Digg has always been a haven because they don’t censor their users (though a story appears every few days claiming differently.) In this case, they pulled the HD-DVD key story. HD-DVD sponsors the digg podcast and digg was afraid of what would happen. The users went NUTS. Digg apparently starting banning users and removing stories as fast as they could. It looks like they even shut down story submission at one point. The result is that just about every story in the last 18 hours has something random title and the HD-DVD key in it. People whipped out every phrase from DMCA to free speech to sold out. It even spilled over onto other sites like Reddit , TechCrunch and TechPwn. The CEO issued a statement that basically said get over it (I’m paraphrasing) and just made things worse. Eventually, the whole frontpage of the site was nothing but crazy stories with the key in them.

Anyway, at the end of the day, it looks like they are sorting everything out. Kevin Rose (I don’t envy the last 24 hours of his life) has issued a statement on the digg blog:

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.

Things are already returning to normal over there. All the HD-DVD stories are being voted down and they’re already beginning to forgive Kevin. However, you have to wonder if this apparent win for user-generated content is in anyone’s best interest. The users now know they may not be able to trust Digg completely. They’ll have that tiny doubt next time, wondering whether Digg will stand up for them. On the other hand, Digg has taken up a sword in what has so far been a very mess fight with a large, sue-happy media company. I’m not sure who ranks higher on the “my life is not as great as it was 24 hours ago” scale.