Digg revolt highlights shortcomings of Web 2.0 view

Angus Kidman
Wednesday, 02 May 2007 13:24

Your IT - Home IT

The Digg community has reacted uproariously to a decision by the site's founders to pull stories revealing how to hack HD DVD, relentlessly promoting endless posts which feature the offending code until they filled the front page of the site. But while the leaders of the revolt are congratulating themselves and the site's founders are oscillating between legal nervousness and bravado, nobody seems to care that the site itself was rendered largely useless by the argument.


The Digg model allows users to rate the stories they find most and least interesting, theoretically creating a front page that reflects the interests of a diverse community rather than a small, selected group of editors. The kerfuffle over the DVD hacking demonstrates, however, that Digg's community may not actually be that diverse.

The arguments started earlier this week when Digg participants noticed that links relating to the key needed for cracking an encrypted HD DVD title, a story which was receiving wide play elsewhere in online media, were silently disappearing from the site.

According to Digg itself, that was because of legal pressures. "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," a posting on the Digg official blog by CEO Jay Adelson noted. "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. Whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the intellectual property holders and consortiums, in order for Digg to survive, it must abide by the law."

'Disagree' turned out to be the popular choice. Angered by the decision, Digg users began repeatedly posting the key for the DVD, promoting other posts that did the same and daring Digg to ban them for doing so. Many of the posts were semi-humorous, adding the offending hexadecimal string to pictures of kittens or pretending it was a mathematical puzzle. Before long, the entire Digg front page consisted of nothing but links to the key.

While the Digg site went offline at several points as the debate raged, the company's founders eventually surrendered to mob rule. "We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration," founder and chief architect Kevin Rose wrote. "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."

To be frank, it doesn't matter, because as soon as the entire site turned into an argument about the right to freely exchange piracy-enabling information, it was basically dead anyway. The functionality of Digg -- enabling interesting items to make their way to a wider audience, based on peer recommendations -- had been entirely subsumed by a minority viewpoint so obsessed with the notion of their own power that the impact they were having, both functional and legal, was entirely ignored.

One poster calculated that 50,000 'digs' relating to the issue had been made, and presented that as an accomplishment. But to put that in perspective: that means at best 50,000 people cared about this issue. (The likely number is much lower, if a small and dedicated crew offered support to each new post on the topic.) For a Top 100 ranked site, it's disturbing to think that a small group of people could create that effect. And it demonstrates that mob rule is frequently a lousy idea, a lesson you'd think we could have learned from history by now.