The day the community took over
by Magnus
Digg.com is a communitydriven
news web site. It was
started in 2004 as a place where
each story was submitted by a
registered user on the site, and
any other user could “digg” or
“bury” a story, depending on
whether they liked it or not.
Digg has become a phenomenon
in a short period of time,
and for web sites it’s a blessing
as well as a curse to get linked to
by Digg. It’s a blessing because it
gives you traffic. But that traffic
can be a curse if you get too
much of it and your site goes
down. On May 1st 2007, an
article was posted to Digg.com
which contained the encryption
key for the protection of
HD DVD content. With the
key anyone could decrypt and
watch otherwise protected
HD DVD content. Digg user
“CJ” had posted a story (www.
cjmillisock.com/2007/05/
how-i-got-banned-from-digg.
html) pointing to a posting
by “Rudd-O” (rudd-o.com/
archives/2007/04/30/spreadthis-
number/) which gave this
encryption key for HD DVD.
CJ’s post got over 15000 diggs
over night, then the comments
about it started disappearing,
the story itself was cut, then
CJ’s Digg account was removed.
According to Digg.com
management this was all done
because they were “acting on the
advice of lawyers”. Jay Adelson,
CEO of Digg wrote (blog.
digg.com/?p=73): “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.” Just eight hours
later, Digg founder Kevin Rose
wrote (blog.digg.com/?p=74):
“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.)... 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.” So
what made Digg change their
position in just a number of
hours? What happened was a
virtual storming of the Bastille.
Thousands of Digg users posted
post and post containing the
encryption key. In every way
imaginable they included the
key in what seemed like benign
posts. As far as we know Digg
tried to fight this for a while
but they realized that it was
of no use. They could either
fight their users, which is a
fight they couldn’t win, or take
a possible fight in court later.
EmiratesMac.com is obviously
nowhere near Digg in terms of
traffic, users, or notoriety. We’re
a small, regional, web site, and
we’re primarily an Apple User
Group web site, not a community
news web site, but there are
similarities. In both cases we rely
heavily on our users to supply
content and make the site successful.
And if users don’t like
something, they’re going to tell
you. That’s something to keep in
mind for any person running a
web site. I know I followed this
story closely.