Yesterday, a story submitted to the popular social news site Digg caused quite a stir among the site readers. The post contained information on what the HD-DVD and Blu-ray encryption format was said to be, to the delight of hundreds of hackers that have been hard at work trying to crack the new high definition formats.
Yesterday, a story submitted to the popular social news site Digg caused quite a stir among the site readers. The post contained information on what the HD-DVD and Blu-ray encryption format was said to be, to the delight of hundreds of hackers that have been hard at work trying to crack the new high definition formats.
Digg prides itself on being all about user generated content. It's a community where the content is submitted and voted on by the users to the tune of hundreds of articles everyday. So it was no surprise when the information on what's now being termed a secret HD DVD Key hack surfaced. The problem arose when the Digg owners stepped in and removed the post, thus circumventing their own rules and proclamations about being pro user.
The user community immediately cried foul and have accused Digg of bowing to sponsor pressure because HD DVD is a sponsor of the site. It's being suggested that because the sponsor threatened to pull their funding the powers that be chose to act "in their best interest". By pulling the article, the user community felt they had been let down by the administration of the site and immediately began a campaign to teach them a lesson. Numerous articles containing the same information about the hack key were submitted and quickly Dugg to the frontpage. It was such a problem that for at least a time, the submission form that allows new posts to be submitted to the service was taken offline.
The CEO of Digg, Kevin Rose had this to say on his blog.
Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts"¦
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.
And the world Diggs on, but the community isn't happy. Some say that Rose is merely covering himself by insinuating that legal action was taken against the site. It's hard to say really what the real motive is, and there is hundreds of arguments that could be drawn from this. On the one hand I'm inclined to believe Rose's statement, but on the other, I can also see the temptation of being pressured by a sponsor to take action. Either way it doesn't bode well for Digg in the near future. The real question is, how much integrity did the site and it's operators lost within the community? Did they lose any?
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