The Digg effect
May 3rd, 2007It’s been an interesting 48 hours for the guys at Digg. Having taken a decision to remove a post displaying the hexadecimal code which breaks the protection on HD-DVDs, the site was inundated with posts re-displaying the keys. At one stage the whole front page of the site contained posts with the keys either in the title or description. Digg temporarily closed the site down and then released this statement via their 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.
They unblocked all posts regarding the HD DVD keys and within a few hours the site appeared to be back to normal with only a few posts about the keys showing on the home page.
What a fiasco, Digg not knowing what to do and Digg users screaming ‘free speech’. The Digg Terms of Use clearly state
Digg may remove any Content and Digg accounts at any time for any reason (including, but not limited to, upon receipt of claims or allegations from third parties or authorities relating to such Content), or for no reason at all.
so the guys were quite within their rights to remove the posts if they so desired.
But what about free speech or more correctly ‘Freedom of Speech’. The term is generally used when a government censors a citizen or citizens from expressing their views no matter what the views are. To apply it to a website removing user content seems extreme in my opinion. Digg own, manage and run the site, they should be ‘free’ to display whatever they want on their site. They should listen to what their visitors want on the site, but it’s still their call.
Probably the most ironic thing all about the whole fiasco is that the keys are easily available on the net and have been for a while. Perhaps it was all just a big scam by Digg ….
Featured Tags digg, freedom_of_speech, hd_dvd, hexadecimal_code
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Comments
Supposing you’re the starter of the business worthing many many million dollars and your business is based solely on the community and you’re in danger of losing many users in favor of the competition and get a bad overall reputation, would you still care about the Terms of Use everyone accepted but probably did not read? :)
You’re right, to remove the posts was probably a bad long term business decision. However they DO have the right to remove the posts. This fact seemed to be ignored by the majority of their visitors judging by their reaction to the removal of the posts. As for not reading TOC, I admit I don’t read them all, especially when signing up for a site, but the TOC are there to protect the site owner and visitor alike. Digg’s TOC clearly states – only took me a few seconds to find the relevant section – that Digg have full editorial control over the site.
In my opinion they were quite entitled to do what they did (remove the posts) and if the visitor doesn’t like it they just have to go to another site. The mob mentality that ensued was like a modern day hi-tech vigilante witch hunt.