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Digg Users Revolt

by Terrence O'Brien on May 2, 2007 at 02:01 PM

Digg Users Revolt
In case you're unfamiliar, Digg is social bookmarking website. Users submit stories and then vote to "digg" or "bury" them. The most popular stories end up on the front page. This puts the power at Digg firmly in the users' hands much like at YouTube and other "Web 2.0" sites.

User power at Digg was put to the test when someone submitted a story that contained a magic little number, a hexadecimal string that just so happened to be the key to decrypting and breaking the copy protection on HD-DVDs. The story quickly shot to the top of the Top Digg Stories. Fearing legal issues, administrators deleted the story only to have a second story submitted and shoot to the top within minutes. Digg administrators also promptly deleted the second story, too.

The back and forth carried on for hours, but when it was discovered that the Diggnation podcast was sponsored by the HD-DVD Promotion Group, all hell broke loose.

The administrators were unable to keep up with power of their user base as they filled the front page with stories that had the HD-DVD key in the title, in the text, and even in photos of kittens. The users revolted over the censorship and perceived corruption, while the administrators were overrun in what one user called a "digital Boston Tea Party."

Late last night Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, threw in the towel: "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."

The code is now readily available.

Related links:

From Oh Gizmo

Tags: digg, hd-dvd, pirate, web

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