May 1: The Day Digg almost died. The Day Digg was reborn.
The first of May will be remembered by Diggers for years to come. It could be remembered as the day Digg almost died or it could be remembered as the day Digg was firmly (re) established as a democracy in its truest sense. The Digg Administrative staff along with the rest of the online community sat with their hands tied down as they were taught a lesson of how the freedom of speech will not be taken away from the Diggers.
Not only did Digg deleted the two stories relating to the HD-DVD Processing key made public , it blocked the website (rudd-o.com) that housed the story, deleted comments and went as far as banning users. In a blog post entitled “What’s Happening with HD-DVD Stories?” Digg CEO Jay Adelson said “..we want Digg to continue to be a great resource for finding the best content. However, in order for that to happen, we all need to work together to protect Digg from exposure to lawsuits that could very quickly shut us down.” Weather it was done to avoid lawsuits, or to protect their corporate interests (Diggnation podcast was sponsored by HD-DVD a few episodes ago) remains a matter of question.
Censorship isn’t something Diggers are used to and it isn’t something they would take; especially with the fact that hundreds of other websites, including rival Slashdot proudly retained the key on their website and servers. The ‘normal’ flow of Digg was brought to a standstill as in a few hours the entire Digg website was flooded by stories carrying smart manipulations of the Key in the form of pictures, numbers, MD5 Hashes etc. They did everything to ‘stick it up to the man’. More than 50000 ‘diggs’ were recorded on stories relating to the key, 45000 of which were on the front page alone. For them it wasn’t about the key; the key had already been available since February this year at various places. It was about the principle of Digg turning its back on the very user base that it made such a huge success. Such was the impact of this ‘revolt’ that Digg itself felt the ‘Digg Effect’; a term attributed to the phenomenon of Website servers acting sluggish or becoming unavailable because of the high intensity of traffic.
Soon enough the Digg staff realised what they were up against and who the power really belong to. In a post entitled “Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0”, Kevin Rose founder of Digg said
“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.”
This has now become the highest dugg post in the history of Digg at more than 28500 diggs and it continues to rise. While many comments on the website claimed the ‘death’ of Digg; it was also the day Digg was reborn. Like a phoenix, it was reborn from its own ashes, only much stronger and bigger. I can say with certainty that after today, no one, not even the Digg staff will dare underestimate the power of its community.
Tags: digg