Digg Dugg, Part Deux

When I went to bed last night, Digg was in a state of lockdown - stories being deleted and users being banned. I woke up this morning none the wiser, and was planning on talking about Digg's reaction for a bit.

But then, around 9PM last night, Kevin Rose (Digg's owner) had a change of heart:

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.

And I'm not really sure what to make of this. It still may be too early for proper analysis, so bear with me if I 180 on this in a couple of days.

Last night, I blogged about the beginning of the kerfluffle, and (in my near-brain-dead state) said that Digg's users were acting like "spoiled children" and wondered if the consequence of too much information is that "that we no longer exercise discretion in the sharing of it." And I still kind of agree with that. I'll be frank: I find Digg's primary user base to be biased and narcissistic. But that is the price of an experiment like Digg, which allows anyone to vote and comment on news stories. Hell, that's the price of any democracy: that the system can and likely will be co-opted by people who are short-sighted regarding the consequences of their actions, who are obsessed with their own personal agendas, and are not necessarily thinking of the survivability of the whole.

I intended to applaud Digg's discretion at cracking down on this story, because the owners of Digg need to exercise their own self-interest (IE, the survivability of the site.) But in retrospect, I think their decision to allow the hex code to be shared is in many ways more true to the spirit of the site they founded. Rose's blog post made clear that the consequences of this action could very well be that the site gets shut down, and if Digg users still want to vote the story with the hex code up, so be it.

However.

There's the other aspect to this story - the information aspect. While Digg may be the focal point of this battle, a Google search for the key (not linked here - I refuse to be a part of this "revolt," even though I may have quietly squirreled away a copy of the key on my thumbdrive) and it returns some 36,000 hits (source: BoingBoing) - as of 9AM PST on May 2. And that number will only grow. The AACS is basically fucked here: the DeCSS DVD key shared circa 1999 was only of interest to a much smaller web-based community. Now, it's literally everywhere, and someone with a dial-up AOL account can have it in seconds (even if they wouldn't know how to put it to use.)

It's simply not possible to put the genie back in the bottle at this point. The question becomes, and it's one I've asked before, at what point does responsibility and discretion kick in?

I don't have time for a proper thought experiment on this, so I'll simply ask the question and let it percolate.

Digg Dugg

I'm browsing through the SA Forums while watching some Futurama reruns, and I come across this thread about something on Digg.

Turns out that earlier today, someone cracked the HD-DVD encryption key. The one that was supposed to be super-secure so that movie studios could prevent piracy on HD-DVDs. And like DeCSS for DVDs, someone posted the key online. And it was on Digg. And then Digg removed the story, and banned the user who posted it for violating his terms of service.

And Digg, being a democratic website full of, well, Internet types, revolted. For the last several hours, all the top stories and many comments have included the key. Digg's blog posted an explanation. Any story not containing the key is being buried.

I've not always been impressed with Digg in the past, but witnessing its possible destruction at the hands of its own overly-self-important users is leaving a sour taste in my mouth. Despite its shortcomings, the theory behind Digg is certainly an honorable one. But its users are showing themselves to be little more than a bunch of spoiled children. And I cannot help but think:

Is this the consequence of too much information, that we no longer exercise discretion in the sharing of it?

Fooling Digg

As much as many of us involved in New Marketing would like to think that the web is a self-policing system, it is still a system that can be gamed. From someone at my office (via Digg itself), an account of buying Diggs and creating popularity with money.

I can tell you exactly how a pointless blog full of poorly written, incoherent commentary made it to the front page on Digg. I paid people to do it. What's more, my bought votes lured honest Diggers to vote for it too. All told, I wound up with a "popular" story that earned 124 diggs -- more than half of them unpaid. I also had 29 (unpaid) comments, 12 of which were positive.

It's interesting to note that while the writer was initially able to game the system, it did - eventually - begin policing itself to the point where the story was buried (see page 2 of the article.)

I'm undecided if that's simply because she didn't pay for enough Diggs, and all the Diggs she paid for happened at the same time, or because the community really is self-policing. What I do know is that even if a story like that were eventually buried, it would only take a couple of hours of it being "popular" before it started showing up everywhere. I don't see this as a flaw in Digg's system (which, let's be fair, is flawed.) It's a flaw in the blogosphere than many bloggers - and commentors - simply don't bother to check their facts. It's the same philosophy that lands emails with the subject line "FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: BILL GATES WILL PAY U $1 FOR EACH PERSON U SEND THIS 2" in my inbox every now and again.

But outlets like Digg make it worse, because bloggers assume that Digg's (clearly flawed) technology is safeguarded against these kinds of efforts - so there's a basic level of trust inherent in linking to stories from Digg.

Oddly enough, there are many in the blogosphere who view their work as more "pure," simply because they're not dealing with traditional PR and marketing/advertising-influenced publications (like newspapers, etc.) And yet samples like this show that a minimal investment - far less than sending a single press kit to the New York Times, and following it up to get it noticed - show that it may be even easier for New Marketers without scruples to manipulate the system. I could cite another instance I know of (where it was done TO us, rather than BY us), but I'm not sure if I'd be breaking confidentiality, so I won't.

But this kind of thing is sadly more common that you might imagine.