Call it a triumph for the audience. The events of the past day at community-based news site Digg offer an insight into how it is virtually impossible to control information in the age of the internet.
The revolt was sparked off by Digg’s decision to take down a submission with details of a software key that breaks the encryption on HD-DVDs. Digg did so to comply following legal pressure from the HD-DVD DRM body.
The reaction of its users was swift. The story was re-submitted by the thousands, straining the site.
The outburst prompted Digg to relent. In the words of Digg founder, Kevin Rose:
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.
The episode demonstrates the power that now resides in “the people formerly known as the audience.” It shows the power of a community like Digg’s, once it unites around an issue.
Digital rights management, or what some might describe as the crippling of digital media, has also stirred up strong opinions online. As one blog put it: We, digital citizens – commonly referred to by the vulgar term of ‘consumers’ – have had enough of content lock-in.”
UPDATE: From Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch: “Until today, it seems, even Digg didn’t fully understand the power of its community to determine what is “news.” I think the community made their point crystal clear. Vive La Revolution.”
2nd UPDATE: Journalism.co.uk reports on the story, with the headline “Mob justice rules on Digg.” Hmmm.
The power of the crowd is meaningless when the manufacturer can change the code whenever it wants to. So the code will work on a few models for a few years or until that model is made obsolete or taken in for repairs under warranty. Presto wacko, new chip installed and no more freebies. These stories ARE NOT NEW. Seven years ago it was a T-shirt with some code on it which would give DVD users free access to something. The T-shirts got pulled, but someone posted a photo of the front of the T-shirt on the web — which circumvented the limited judgement against the T-shirt people. That’s *seven years ago*. This kind of hack happens every year, every single time there’s a tech product rollout. All the people did at Digg was the same thing people did seven years ago and every year since, they just did it within the uberkewl confines of Digg which made it easy for newbie reporters to reference. Remember the Cult Of The Dead Cow? They’re been doing stuff like this since 1984.
[...] Michael Arrington of techcrunch writes that “[to call…] what happened today on Digg a ‘user revolt’ is an understatement“. Reportr calls it ‘a triumph for the audience‘. [...]