Somewhere, Jason Calacanis is smiling.
If you haven’t heard, Digg went crazy last night over the removal of a post about an HD key hack that had made it to the front page. The hack unlocked HD DVD’s and allows for removing encrypted DRM (rights management) which is always a touchy subject with the Digg audience. Once the story was removed at the behest of a cease and desist order, all hell broke loose…
Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, writes on the Digg blog (a post that has over 15,500 diggs at the moment which is the most in Digg history I believe)…
“In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.”
However, Rose says that Digg made the wrong call in removing the post and after a mountain of diggs and new posts that immediately made it to the front page flaunting the HD key…
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.
This morning, everyone is looking at what happened and either declaring social media dead or as unable to handle the responsibility to create and sculpt a mature community. However, that’s short sighted. We are attempting to fit a square peg in a round hole when we expect a phenomenon such as online “social media” to abide by the behavior of a mainstream audience.
What the Digg fiasco shows us is that social communities are all niche and will behave as such. Digg is one of the largest and most well-known social media sites, however the real work of keeping the community going and filtering through stories is done by a rather small number of people (predominately young men interested in tech). It is a rather homogeneous group and not at all representative of the general population who might occasionally visit or browse Digg.
Their behavior last night shows that niche communities rally around common points of interest or antagonism and respond like a swarm of bees. The Digg community would not have responded the way it did if an Opera book club hack had been posted and then removed. Instead, they responded to a topic near and dear to their hearts… which is what makes that (and all) communities go round.
So, dear tech world… get off of your high horse and let’s learn from this rather than pretending as if we don’t respond the same way in our own niche communities when there is a sudden change or perceived threat to our own identities. We’d behave similarly if TechMeme censored an Arrington or Scoble story.
All communities are mobs. The trick is channeling that mob behavior into something creative and sustainable.
