Throughout yesterday, Digg users revolted against a decision made by CEO, Jay Adelson, to remove posts pertaining to the publicizing of an HD DVD encryption code.
Excerpt from Adelson’s blog post:
This has all come up in the past 24 hours, mostly connected to the HD-DVD hack that has been circulating online, having been posted to Digg as well as numerous other popular news and information websites. We’ve been notified by the owners of this intellectual property that they believe the posting of the encryption key infringes their intellectual property rights. In order to respect these rights and to comply with the law, we have removed postings of the key that have been brought to our attention.
In retaliation Diggers utilized the popular Social Network to their own advantage which escalated into a full day of anti-digg submissions. Dugg posts ranging from bogus url submissions to claims on the death of Digg.com, monopolized the front page of the popular social news site.
In similar news, search giant Google, responds to arguments in a complaint submitted by Viacom, this case is quite similar to one in which Rose hopes to avoid by his decision to remove the offending posts which caused for yesterdays debacle.
Diggers found their battle well fought, with Digg founder Kevin Rose’s recent post on the Digg Blog.
In response to yesterdays protests, Rose states:
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.
Neil Patel at Pronet Advertising posts a rebuttal on Digg’s original decision, in which Adelson declares Digg.com as democratic. Although Neil posts specifically on the technical issues behind Digg, one can simply sit back and see that there is definitely a form of democracy based on yesterdays events. In this case, the “veto” was clearly practiced.
An unfortunate situation, Digg.com has found the very thing that could cause for their demise, the voice of their users. The same can be said for all social networking websites across cyberspace, a single decision can cause for serious repercussions.
The positive thought in all of this, is the true power was always in Kevin Rose’s hand, he simply pushed the escape button and the protests went away. Now imagine such a saga about your own business or person, on any online social network, do you have an escape button too?