next story Blogs_next_icon

The Power of the Community - Digg has no control over it.

Digg users today went on a mass revolution over the deletion of a couple of stories and a few users.

Digg today deleted a couple of home page stories that linked to the decryption key for HD-DVDs. Soon some more stories related to the same appeared on the home page and those got deleted too. Enraged over this, the Digg community went on a rampage (literally) and flooded the first few pages on Digg with stories related to this. There was even a website setup with the decryption key and a similar sounding title on Digg that made it to the home page, prompting Kevin Rose to write this on his blog:

"Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

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.

Digg on,
Kevin"

Looks like the power of the community has caught Digg by surprise.