Angry users teach Digg a lesson

Popular news aggreggator site Digg.com censored user stories that contained a hexadecimal code that would allow the circumvention of the HDDVD copy protection. Users reacted and inundated the web site with new stories about the hex code and Digg’s decision to remove stories, ban users and even delete user accounts. At the time of writing, Digg.com is down, brought to its knees by its own angry user community.

In its own blog, one the Digg’s CEOs defended the censorship, saying that he had to prevent Digg.com from being shut down by lawsuits if they hadn’t removed the offending hex code.

Digg users wouldn’t have any of this though. The front page was completely flooded with new stories about Digg’s censorship, repetitions of the hex code, and comments of disgruntled users who had their stories their deleted and/or the “dugg” count on their stories reduced.

When I visited digg.com just an hour ago, many stories where in the 4000-5000 diggs range, and other bloggers reported record digg counts as high as 15,000. Digg reacted, at first by disabling the posting of new posts, but eventually they decided to take the whole site offline.

In their stories and comments, many users argued that Digg wasn’t going about this issue the right way, and many even predicted that today will mark the death of digg.

Being responsible for a community site myself, this phenomenon certainly is telling. Don’t upset your community, is the lesson to be learned. Granted, the people responsible at Digg probably saw themselves sitting somewhere between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, there’s the law to be upheld, on the other hand, there is a community and a certain spirit that has made Digg into what it is today (or was yesterday, at least).

Digg’s not alone: Google/Youtube faces similar problems. On one hand, copyright violations are extremely common, on the other hand, taking a tougher stance against its users may be an extremely unpopular move. Those with high powered lawyers and big pockets to pay them will probably first opt to withstand and fight legal threats, and it’s exactly here where Digg users blame Digg for having caved too quickly. The issue is even trickier as HD DVD itself was a sponsor of Diggnation.com, a popular webcast associated with Digg.

We’ll see whether this will blow over and whether it will, believe it or not, even strengthen Digg to become even more popular. Remember when Wikipedia.com received all this negative publicity about having more errors in its content than Encyclopedia Britannica? During this upheaval, Wikipedia’s traffic doubled(!) and continued to grow with reinforced strength.

So maybe there is something in the old saying of “what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger”.

And now go and digg this, if you can.