Good point…if Digg was mine I’d rather lose some (many?) users than risk the company on some illegal code.

By Todd on May 2, 2007

I caught the whole thing as it happened, and I was among the first to post comments, Twitter, and do a blog post about it.

Kevin Rose buckled to the HD DVD people because the parent company of Digg is invested in this product. I say fuck all DRM, RIAA, and MPAA.

Andrew Keen is a fucking asshat fool and #1 enemy of Cluetrain Triumphant.

By vaspers the grate on May 2, 2007

The Digg meltdown mutiny about-face will be studied for years to come. This was the Hurricane Katrina of user generated content.

The users won.

The DRM and MSM are doomed. I feel almost ecstatic seeing “consumers” cripple the giant behemoths of domination.

Hollywood, RIAA, etc. want to charge you $$$ every time a “celeb” or “star” farts.

This reminds me of how the RIAA tried to add a big tax to blank cassette tapes. The idiot scum were afraid we’d all tape songs off the radio and share them with others, and all record stores would close.

Yet it’s mp3s that are going to make record stores close. Can’t fight technology.

By vaspers the grate on May 2, 2007

Way to go, my friend. Scoble twittered this post.

By vaspers the grate on May 2, 2007

Loren,

Your point is valid, and I initially thought it was wrong to give into the Digg Milita over the HD-DVD C&D notice. But then I thought about it…

Most news sites out there with social networking features, like the USA Today for instance, have their own content to provide their users. The fact that there is any layer of social integration is an added bonus that has proven itself valuable.

To other sites, like Digg, where they HAVE NO CONTENT, and rely 100% on their user base to create and contribute that content, they have much more to lose.

In the example of USA Today, if they were to wipe out some posts, they would lose a few commentators to their articles. However they would still publish material the next day and retain dedicated readers.

In the example of Digg, if they were to wipe out some posts, they would lose a united group of single-minded tech geeks that are the essence of their community. I don’t say single-minded to be rude, but let’s be honest, Kevin got scared like anyone else when Big Brother said “do or die” and instead of being sympathetic, the entire community desecrated the entire front page.

With a tug-of-war game going on, he had to choose. One of his sponsors, who can easily be replaced, or his user base, who cannot.

It’s a hard choice. But ultimately he did what was best. Not necessarily what was right. But what was best.

By Shaun Rotman on May 2, 2007

Shaun,

Intriguing commentary. Isn’t “what was best” also, ultimately, “what was right”? Or at least should be?

By flic on May 2, 2007

If this is real, Digg might as well save itself some bandwidth and close now. Because the **AA will never back down, and a simple court-ordered search mean all the servers, routers AND power supplies taken out by big burly men under the watchful eye of a few coppers. (don’t get too excited Vince).

Building a community is like building a club. You have to cherry pick the early users because they will decide what the site will look like a year on. For example, I stopped reading digg the day ‘how to shave’ frontpaged with 500 diggs.

They chose their community a long time ago. They could have filtered out the pre-teens and the ‘me too’ crowd. They could have catered to the slashdot exiles instead, and deal a deadly blow to the leading tech sites. Instead they decided to go for ‘as many users as possible, as fast as possible’. 6 months on they couldn’t exit the blogosphere/early adopter circuit despite their best efforts to branch into other topics such as politics. 12 months on they couldn’t generate press without a sarcastic ‘these kids could be worth a lot of money’ angle, to their great frustration.

No one take them seriously anymore. “Getting digged” means getting 10,000 page views/hour with very transient users and no real buying power. I personally rather not getting any Terapad site digged, all it does is cost bandwidth and waste time.

By Stephan Tual on May 2, 2007

I agree with Mr. Tual, as usual.

Digg is pretty lame, and I removed the Digg feedroll in my sidebar after a similar rash of irrelevant, juvenile topics.

But it was more than just censoring content generated by users. Kevin Rose, according to the blogs involved, was actually banning users and deleting accounts.

Some say all they did was *question why* Kevin was censoring and deleting. That was apparently enough to get them deleted also.

I have heard that this was not uncommon at Digg.

By vaspers the grate on May 2, 2007

Reading “Coolhunting” by Peter Gloor & Scott Cooper (AMACOM, 2007).

It speaks of “swarm creativity” in beehives and how there is self-organization by the user community of bees. Interesting.

Collaborative Innovation Networks concept.

By vaspers the grate on May 4, 2007

Yeah, Stephan, where are those big burly men when we need them?

By Vince Williams on May 6, 2007