Digg vs. HEX

Well it looks like Digg is going down in flames right now.

It all started with someone submitting the HD-DVD encryption key for Linux playback yesterday. It eventually got to the homepage and then “mysteriously” disappeared. Apparently Digg took it down claiming that they must abide by the “law”, referencing intellectual property and their own TOS.

So the digg “community” is all up in arms, with good reason. I say good reason because there may be ulterior motive for Digg to can the stories. Either way it’s proven the majority that make up the “community” of digg are of what makes up digg are a bunch of mental defective kids or loner nerds that don’t know how to handle complicated situations.

So it’s a no win for Digg. Even when this settles (which shouldn’t be long since the stereo-type for these diggers have low attention spans) the true communities will be exposed as morons; and who’s going to follow a bunch of morons. Not me.

Pretty good timing since Newsvine.com relaunched. Maybe I’ll check out Netscape.com.

Update: To help prove my point I’ve dugg my own article, which is a cardinal sin for digg but we’ll find out if the “community” cares.

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May 01

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About the Author, Dan Cameron:

I'm the owner and solution engineer at Sprout Venture, a web solutions company that specializes in web development including WordPress.

I started my first blog in 2003 and transitioned to WordPress in 2004. Since moving to WordPress I've written a few plugins and themes for public consumption. Lately I'm busy engineering/building/coding and have only been able to share a few code snippets.

If you're in need of some web development, web design or custom WordPress plugins and/or themes contact me, I'll be happy to discuss it with you.

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  • It's typical late 20th century American attitude - that because a website/artist/band/singer/movie/etc. wouldn't "exist" without the fans, that the fans are owed some form of control over said website/artist/band/etc. How many times have you heard a justification that because the first two movies made millions, that a director has to bend to the will of the fans for the third (for example)? Star Wars, anyone?

    Yeah, this Digg thing, the reaction from the community, isn't surprising. Digg doesn't belong to the users, it belongs to the people that actually own it. They call the shots, whether the petulant children like it or not.
  • Sorry, but I disagree.

    Digg does not "belong" to you or the larger Digg "community"; I'm pretty sure it's a private company, probably looking to be sold; so right now it belongs to the founders (Kevin, Jay, etc.) and eventually it will belong to whoever they sell it to, if they do.

    You are correct in stating that Digg is where it is today (for better or worse) because of that community, but they don't owe them anything, and they've always had rules in place that govern what is allowed to be posted on their site.

    I'm curious to know whether you are pissed that they also ban/remove posts on other topics, as I mentioned above (porn, racism, etc.), because it's the exact same issue - it's their site and they can decide what gets hosted on it. I'm positive that there's language in the user agreement / TOS that says as much.
  • Digg case was just a small representation of a revelion against copyrighs. There exist thousends of ways to get those numbers, and probably all the community have them. What they were fighting is the right to controll the comunity "Digg".
    Digg belongs to the users that "digg" the articles.
    Banning them is a kind of control over the users. Digg gave that control to their users to become what it is today. Can they take that power off just like that?
    NO.
    Digg is an example of democracy, democracy is not the best choice is the will of the majority.
  • Hmm... I actually respected the original post which gave a perfectly good explanation for why they were removing the problem posts. Caving under pressure from the users, especially those kind of juvenile tactics is a bad move, IMO.

    I can only wonder now whether they'd make exceptions to their other banned topics (like porn and racial hate sites) if enough idiots flood the system with diggs...

    PS - you still need to fix those comment link styles; if I didn't read your comment in RSS I'd have no idea that there was a link to Kevin's post.
  • Dan
    I think I made my last digg this morning and it's funny because my post got 23 diggs in a matter of minutes before Kevin Rose posted about their new stance which will be to allow the 2 month old hex code to be published.

    I actually forgot to mention a very funny part of this whole debacle was the "hack" was exposed months ago, but only know is it a big deal.

    And like I said those morons do have short attention spans because everything is all hunky dory now since Rose's post which wouldn't make things straight for me if I acted like the thousands that infected digg. It makes no sense to have that reaction and then fold under a post like that.
  • After seeing more on this today, and seeing the reaction of the "community" - retaliating by trying to flood the site with posts containing the keys and whining about Kevin and the other Digg staff taking them down - all I can say is that it really confirms my reasons for not trusting this particular group of users to rate news stories for me.
  • Say it ain't so! Digg had to remove those posts; whether it was the "right" thing to do is another matter, but ultimately irrelevant.

    Digg exists primarily to be a successful commercial venture, and it has always been my opinion that that makes them a poor candidate for a central news hub that's supposed to be controlled and/or directed "by the people / community". This story is a perfect example of that point.
  • Digg's actually auto-deleting a lot of the stories that have that stupid number or HD-DVD in the title. I was messing around with submitting stories about the fiasco linking to my blog (yes, I'm guilty of trying to take advantage of the mob rule ;) and noticed that several of my stories completely disappeared. While I think that it sucks that the digg homepage is being flooded with shit stories, I think trying to censor further is just going to keep adding fuel to the fire.
    Nick
    http://adgridwork.com
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