Marcel Weiss's Library tagged digg →  View Popular

It’s been almost two weeks since the latest Digg fiacso. Quick review: stories with HD-DVD encryption codes being censored, Diggers strike back by creating, posting and digging new stories with the codes, Digg’s Kevin Rose conceded.

However, it appears that Digg’s censorship issues are far from over. Rising stories are disappearing after being buried not by the community of Diggers, but by Digg employees (or, possibly, a specific algorithm targeting sites from specific URLs or types of sites). Neil Patel and Andy Hagans have seen this happening to stories that they’ve followed, as have others.

How do they know these stories aren’t being buried by the Digg community? Neil points to a URL that displays the last 10,000 buries. He also provides an archived copy of the last 10,000 buries before a Pronet story disappeared. The Pronet story appears nowhere in the last 10,000 buries. Stefan Juhl apparently reported to Neil the last referrer to one of his stories before it was buried was “crawl3.digg.internal.”

Whatever the “right” decision was for Digg regarding whether or not to delete the offending post, Digg knows it is nothing without its passionate and participating members. The enlightened path should have been obvious to them: be completely transparent with users from the beginning. Before it took any action that stripped power from users, Digg should have shared its dilemma with the community, explained the conundrum and the legal advice it had been given, and then solicited candid feedback via its forum. Debate would have ensued, but everyone would have felt like they were part of Digg’s ultimate decision, even if that was deletion of the code. More than anything, passionate users want to be heard.

These are simple steps that would have turned “us vs. them” into “us and only us”…without having to relinquish control to a “tyranny of the majority.”

Can you address the seeming conflict between the fact that Kevin Rose has a show available for download (The Broken) that contains illegal hacks for DVDs, XBox games and CDs, but Digg removed a post from a user that contained information that would allow someone to hack an HD DVD?

Revision3 is a content creator, not a content aggregator. There is no similarity between the two businesses. You are refering to a show where the two hosts played characters that are exaggerations. The intent is to be funny. Obviously they make jokes about pirating and hacking.

What about the assertion that because Kevin’s show DiggNation had HD DVD as a sponsor this is somehow connected to the deletion of the HD DVD hack code on Digg.com?

Diggnation is a show where they discuss their dissatisfaction with DRM. But there is no connection between the shows on Revision3 and Digg.com.

OK, but the show DiggNation is primarily based on posts listed on the Digg.com website. The content on Digg.com is the meat of the DiggNation show...

In the case of HD DVD being a sponsor on Revision3, if Revision3 takes a call from an agency that wants advertising space on DiggNation, it is no way connected to anything that’s on Digg.com.

On another note, I see that you recently opened Digg’s API to the public. But in the recent past Kevin Rose mentioned
that Digg would have to protect its trademark. So far, Twitter has
allowed sites to exist with “twitter” in their names as more users
experiment with the Twitter API. Along the same lines, will you
continue to go after sites that use the Digg API and use “digg” in
their names?

Good question. We never cared about people using Digg’s data. The
issue is if someone creates a site that uses Digg in the domain name.
If it were just up to us, we would allow it. But if someone names a
product or sells a product with Digg in the name, it is an issue and we
could have to enforce our trademark. But you pose a very good question.
You can expect some commentary in the future about how we intend to
deal with the trademark issue.