This was an interesting piece of news that I stumbled upon yesterday and have been following a bit. For those who don’t know, Digg.com is basically a site where users submit some kind of news story or article that they think is interesting and people vote on ones that they like a lot. The more “Diggs†an article receives the more exposure it gets.
What happened is that a user submitted an article which displayed information about the HD-DVD processing key which was 09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0. Now since this information can possibly be used in a negative way, apparently HD-DVD is a sponsor of Digg and as a result the post was removed for legal and business reasons it seems due to a direct request from their sponsor.
As a result, the Digg community was outraged over this as a lot of people saw this as simply censorship on a site that relies on user generated content and articles. Users then began to create multiple posts about the censorship along with more posts containing the HD-DVD processing key. Digg users kept on voting for these and as a result the entire front page of the site was dominated by all of the protest. At the same time, those posts were also being deleted. I have taken a screenshot example here:
Digg has a blog located at http://blog.digg.com/ where the operators of the site commented on its policies and why the post was taken down. A few hours later, another post was made by one of the founding members of Digg. He comments on how the company has terms and policies in place in order to keep the company alive. However, after reading all of the community comments, the Digg operators expressed that they have listened to their users and will refrain from deleting future posts containing the HD-DVD processing key and are prepared to face the consequences in doing so even if it means their company will be shut down.
This is such an interesting event from a business point of view I think as many times people debate on whether or not they should abide to the request of their user base as many times people request for things emotionally rather than rationally from a one-sided point of view. On a semi-related note, a common example of this type of conflict would be advertisements on a site. In a lot of cases, from the operator point of view they obviously need revenue to be able to offer what it is that they do while at the same time users revolt against seeing banner ads on the site and claim that the site owner sold out. I’ve seen many sites fold back in the day as a result of something similar.
Maybe it is just me, but I personally think that is an extreme over reaction. The company had a valid reason to do so as they were simply doing what they thought they had to do to protect the company. I can’t say that I fully agree with the decision to simply allow those posts to go through as not only are they pretty much inviting the worst to happen, but I would be more worried where by doing this are they in some way encouraging their user base to do the same thing for an even more serious situation? For example, if someone posts up explicit pornographic material which is then taken down and enough people complain about it would that mean they would keep it up? Obviously that is over exaggerated a bit, but it makes you wonder. There must be a lot of opinions about this event.