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Censorship-sick Digg users mutiny; Digg explodes, loses

Posted by The Technocrat | Filed under Web

The users of Digg have finally had enough with the false ‘management’ of front-page stories and the censorship of certain stories by Digg management. Upon posting stories naming the HD-DVD master key, several were taken down, as stories of that nature are on Digg. Users refused to give up, and began a massive flood campaign listing the key on Digg. At one point yesterday, the first five pages in the ‘technology’ section were all related to the incident, ad Digg had at least a 10+ minute downtime as the servers lost their ability to keep up with the flood.

Finally at around midnight last night, Digg founder Kevin Rose posted his own story listing the HD-DVD key and cited his post from the official Digg blog:

“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.”

As of the time of this writing, the post had been digg’ed 23,800 times after its listing 10 hours, 48 minutes. The digg system is still in recovery mode.

Personally, I feel any usefulness of Digg was lost when it was discovered that certain stories are engineered by the Digg staff to make it to the top, and some are killed. While it’s fine to have a directory service, it’s not OK to describe your service as being driven by the users when there is clearly a large amount of control being placed on the system by its management.

Digg the Kevin Rose post, and make sure to let Digg and other fake “crowdsourcing” companies know that although we’re “just users”, most of us do still have some sense of what’s morally right and wrong and we’re not afraid to act on it, even if it isn’t in the best interests of a company (or site sponsor’s) marketing strategy…

Comments (0) | May 2nd, 2007