Ey up, there’s trouble at t’Digg…

May 2, 2007

Digg users are revolting. Techcrunch has the details:

To say what happened today on Digg was a “user revolt” is an understatement. The Digg team deleted a story that linked to the decryption key for HD DVDs after receiving a take down demand and all hell broke loose. More stories appeared and were deleted, and users posting the stories were suspended.

That just got the Digg community fired up, and soon the entire Digg home page was filled with stories containing the decryption key. The users had taken control of the site, and unless Digg went into wholesale deletion mode and suspended a large portion of their users, there was absolutely nothing they could do to stop it.

Them crowds aren’t as tame as you may hope…

Technorati tags: digg, ugc, social+media, aggregators

Antony Mayfield

Public notebook

5 responses to “Ey up, there’s trouble at t’Digg…”

Pete Goold

May 2, 2007 at 2:50 pm

Kevin Rose has just responded (also on Tech Crunch):

“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.”
David R

May 2, 2007 at 6:09 pm

C’mon Antony! Where’s your analysis – is this a good thing or not? How far should a site like Digg go in allowing its readers to post material? What credibility will Digg have in the future if it wants to remove other stores? Now it’s bowed to user pressure once, where will it draw the line in future? What kind of user pressure is legitimate – and where does Digg draw the line in deciding just how many users dictate its content policy? Can you extrapolate this to suggest that YouTube should be able to host copyrighted material from broadcasters just because users demand the right to post it there? I rely on you as one of my main sources of thinking on what’s happening in social media. Help me out here! All the best, David
Antony Mayfield

May 3, 2007 at 7:58 am

A deeper mull will follow shortly, David, but…

“Can you extrapolate this to suggest that YouTube should be able to host copyrighted material from broadcasters just because users demand the right to post it there?” – I don’t know, mate, but I do think that this whole thing can’t be reduced to right or wrong – it’s a struggle between different views of the world. I don’t think it is simply a legal argument – it’s a moral one in some ways…

As to where Digg draws the line, I don’t think the users will draw those lines. If they close it down they’ll open up shop elsewhere…
David

May 3, 2007 at 10:01 am

Cheers Antony – it’s not often you get to see two worlds collide in public but it seems to be happening more and more often.

That the problems these days aren’t just legal but also moral – that’s interesting and I need to go away and think about that some more.

It’s intriguing to see how careful big companies have to be nowadays if they’re not to drive customers away by behaving as they’ve always done in a world that is now far less accepting of that type of behaviour.

Social media is giving users and consumers more power than ever before – we seem to be demanding more and more for less and less.

Or perhaps it would be truer to say that what we’re willing to pay for is changing. How do we reconcile the two worlds – I know there’s some interesting stuff going on in this area. And it has to be made to work because somewhere though, a business has to be able to make money….

Interesting.

Anyway, thanks for the quick response. Look forward to reading more. Keep up the good work.
Usable Interfaces

May 5, 2007 at 12:59 pm

I predict ariot

Very interesting to read Antonys two articles about the happenings at Digg: Ey up, theres trouble at tDigg and Thoughts on the Great Digg Revolt of 2007. Digg, obviously, is a folksonomy or bookmarking-popularity site, an…