If you’ve never seen an internet trainwreck before, I’d advise you to head over to Digg and take in all the glory.
It all started when the HD-DVD key was cracked and a subsequent story was posted on Digg. Admins removed that story, which was quickly followed by another posting of the same key/story which reached ~16000 Diggs before Admins removed that story. Now, the site has degenerated into pretty much every story being spammed with the Decryption key in order to “fight the power”. Whatever. Once loyal users are now claiming to jump ship to other social networking sites and engineer the destruction of Digg itself. Self-Inflated sense of worth. Digg posted a Blog entry explaining why they did what they did. No matter, key spammed all over that story. That will probably be removed as well. Real mature.
I always had a feeling that something like this would happen one day over there. The average Digg user feels they are modern day warriors/rebels against “the man”, and above any form of censorship. Hint: You’re not. There are laws and no matter how important you think you are in the hierarchy of Digg, your opinions mean nada when confronted with legal issues. Don’t get me wrong, there were some pretty intelligent users at Digg on the OSS side, Apple side and on the Microsoft side. Not everyone was a zealot that only knew how to regurgitate what they had read or heard somewhere else. I imagine the intelligent ones will stay.
I went there as a good source of amusement. If there was a meme, you could count on it entering a popular story’s comments section at some point. It was too predictable. A good portion of front page stories were either Linux/Apple/Google/Wii related. Microsoft stories could generally be counted upon to have sensationalist Titles to spur the Digg crowd to get the story to the front page, even if the story was twisted beyond any sense of rational thought.
Will Digg fully implode? I seriously doubt it. The affronted crowd will probably move on to the next site and continue their fight against “the man” until they have to move again. Digg may be better off for this imho. I just feel sorry for the site they decide to congregate at next.
Update: Kevin Rose has a blog post up now caving in to the bloodthirsty mob and accepting whatever consequences may come from the posting of “The Key”.
Update: Apparently, “The Key” wasn’t the point of contention according to the unruly Digg’ers. The banning of the initial poster of the story by Digg moderators was what incited the e-riot. The AACS was not amused apparently.
Thoughts?
The largest issue is their failure to disclose their HD-DVD sponsorship. If you noticed, other sites (eg. Reddit, Slashdot) haven’t removed similar articles.
Fair enough. I still don’t see why that really matters in the long haul. If they were told to take it down or face legal action, they did the right thing business wise.
I wouldn’t want to lose my business over a Hex key to satisfy a userbase that doesn’t pay me anything. Would you?
I just submitted this post to Digg. Let’s see if it gets to the front page.
haha, no chance~ You must have submitted it right after I left to go to a client’s business.
3 hours later, 28 Diggs and Page 129. Out of those 28 Diggs, how many visits from Digg…12. A title will get you everywhere on Digg, people don’t even read the article.
It got you a link on Threadwatch.
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/14205
So… 12 Digg visitors and 1 of them linked to you. Not bad if you ask me. Getting links is the primary reason to bait those folks in the first place.
Yeap, a PR6 site at that.
Since you’re here…
If the link came from a page with no PR, does the Parent site’s PR count towards my site, or no?
*stupid at SEO stuff*
(IMO) Absolutely!
(Fresh blog posts are usually born with no pagerank.)
Good deal then!
Thanks a ton for the information.
Nevertheless it’s difficultly to find a resource more readable, animated than Digg. I fell myself there a part of a society and do not reflect