Digg goes down in flames; business as usual at Slashdot HQ
First, the short version of what happened to Digg today. Someone posted a HD-DVD cracking key, and the story was removed by Digg’s admins, something which supposedly happens very rarely. However, this time Digg’s community chose not to yield to this decision: they kept posting and posting and posting the same number, and currently Digg’s homepage is literally nothing else than rubble consisting of the said hexadecimal key and angry-mob-style exclamations in the vein of “Digg died today” or “Kevin Rose sold out”. Reports about this are counted by the hundreds; here’s the response from Kevin Rose himself, who promises no more censorships and asks for help to fight impending lawsuits from bigcos; Mashable responds by starting their own bit of fundraising. A discussion about the events on Digg is also quite lively at Reddit.
Amidst all this chaos, I found it funny to check out Slashdot, which sits right next to Digg feed in my RSS reader, and see that it’s delivering news as usual, with a single item about the Digg situation.
The message is clear: EDITORS. Despite Kevin Rose himself yielding to the mob mentality, it’s quite obvious that you can’t simply let people do what they want, otherwise they’ll start posting porn, offensive material and who knows what else. But, if you have editors on the site, don’t try to hide them; make it clear that they’re there, like Slashdot does. Is anyone mad at Slashdot because they have editors which choose which stories go to the front page? Hell, is anyone mad at Netscape for doing that same thing? Instead of fighting a battle you can’t win, Kevin, introduce editors to the site and bring some order to the chaos.
May 1st, 2007 at 11:55 pm
I completely agree Stan. Digg has refused any notion of editors so they can be able to say that they are fully democratic…except in those instances like today where they are not democratic at all. They can’t have it both ways, and though they’ll probably make it through the events of earlier, this problem will keep coming up…”hmm, what can we submit to Digg today that will be removed?..”
May 2nd, 2007 at 12:25 am
@MG Siegler: I never quite understood the controversy about Digg’s “democracy”. Digg can easily be compared to an online forum. And on every single forum I’ve been to, there’s an admin who kicks out idiots. Same goes for chat rooms. I think that Digg should stop playing democracy because it simply doesn’t work.
May 2nd, 2007 at 1:00 am
[…] Features « Digg goes down in flames; business as usual at Slashdot HQ […]
May 2nd, 2007 at 2:22 am
@stan
you are so right.
May 2nd, 2007 at 4:40 am
I guess the idea behind it is that it’s supposed to be self-regulating. Huh! What Mr. Rose and all those Diggers don’t seem to get is that even democracy has rules. (And those are the rules under which self-regulation can be successful.) But they seem to prefer anarchy. Except, guess what? Even the Anarchists have rules!
June 18th, 2007 at 6:54 am
[…] It took me a couple of hours to process what has happened. But, now I know, it is bigger than Digg. […]
March 20th, 2009 at 9:49 am
This is right here, in the present, not the future.