05.03.07
Digg Revolt: Social Media’s Other Shoe Has Dropped
For quite some time (like the last two years) businesses have seen crowd sourced websites as something akin to the Golden Fleece: for nothing passionate users would populate your website with rich content in volumes far greater than anything your own team could do (and they’d work for nothing more than the opportunity to have their account name at the top of a ‘best of’ list).
While some have been warning about the woes these site would suffer if they would bite the hand that feeds them things have worked out pretty well – until now. Digg is a ’social news website’. Users submit news stories and then vote the pieces up or down. In theory this is supposed to create a ‘democratic’ approach to the news.
Things got out of hand this Monday and Tuesday. As Pete Cashmore of Mashable recaps:
The backstory: a story including the number got to the front page, but was quickly pulled by a moderator. That led to another user reposting the story with the number in the description – “Spread This Number. Again”. That story was also pulled, at which point the mob piled in.
Clearly, they’ve now lost the fight over the key: almost every single story on the homepage, and 100% of the popular stories in the technology section are links to sites that aim to propagate that number. This key, for those who don’t know, is a series of numbers which will unlock copy-protected High Definition movies. The MPAA hates this of course, and there’s no one Diggers hate more than the MPAA and RIAA. DRM has met its match against a single-minded army numbering more than one million strong.
Late on Tuesday the public face and founder of Digg, Kevin Rose, threw up his hands in defeat on his blog:
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.
A reader of Om Malik summed the situation up perfectly:
I think the real story here is user-generated content biting back when it’s actively censored by the site generating revenue from it.
Does this mean that crowd sourced efforts are inevitably doomed to have the serfs charge the castle? Why hasn’t this already happened with other aggregated news spots, like SlashDot?
Laura Moncur said,
May 3, 2007 at 9:09 am
That’s a good question: why do Digg users hate Digg? Why would they use the smallest thing as an excuse to take down the site?
Mike and I argued about this all day yesterday and still have come to no final solution…
Milkman said,
May 3, 2007 at 3:06 pm
Does that mean i can’t post 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 here?
You have 2 issues here. Those who believe that the content protection system being used on HD-DVD’s is illegal and are so fighting it anyway they can, and how the original posts got started. Then you have a bandwagoneers(that a word?) that just like to be part of a cause… preferably one that is edgy/cool/rebellious. And really…i have no idea on any effects either one is likely going to have.
Matthew Reinbold said,
May 5, 2007 at 11:04 pm
I think you’ve got a lot more than just two issues Milkman. For example, can someone really ‘own’ a number? Can I run out and say that the digits that make up ‘pi’ represent the critical intellectual property of a new algorithm that belongs to mutednoise? Or better yet, can I threaten everyone who uses a secret combination of letters that I just made up but can’t reveal to you?
And really, the HD-DVD folks sealed their own fate when they played hardball. If the post would have lived and died on its own a few people would have taken note. Then it would have become quickly buried under news of Paris Hilton’s pending jail time. However, by threatening all comers with legal action they’ve sensationalized a random number into permanent Internet infamy.
Somebody somewhere failed public relations 101.
Milkman said,
May 7, 2007 at 9:00 am
Oh i don’t disagree.. i guess i should have been more clear i was posting in response to the comment above, not your original post.
Militant Geek Custom Shirts » Blog Archive » HD-DVD vs. Digg vs. Diggnation said,
May 9, 2007 at 1:45 am
[...] Early last week on our sister site mutednoise I bantered about how Digg’s user base rising up in revolt represented the hereto unmentioned side of social networks; that is, the crowd will bite the hand that feeds it if they think the hand is red. In the comments I mentioned that playing hardball with the entire Internet was absolutely the worst possible strategy. That action took a so-so bit of geek errata and firmly planted it in popular culture. Case in point is this most recent episode of Galacticast (it does get a bit slow in the middle and if you’re not familiar with the television program Lost some jokes might not make sense – but the end gag is killer): Pick your metaphor: the cat is out of the bag, geni out of the bottle, the milk has been spilled and no amount of crying is going to put it back. Digg has since stopped censoring its users and has made the statement that it will ‘go down fighting’. The outcome of which, according to certain legal circles, doesn’t look good. [...]
mutednoise » 5 Enemies of the Future said,
May 13, 2007 at 11:21 pm
[...] The Government – remember how Digg is in hot water because its users posted a certain number to it? Thank the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. We have a political body made up of almost entirely lawyers attempting to make technology policy. Of course they don’t try and come up with this on their own – that’s what lobbyists from well funded corporate players are for (see IP industry below). [...]