Digg Digging Their Own Grave

Posted on May 15, 2007
Filed Under Deep Thought, Fun on the Web, Politics, Techie stuff, Web 2.0 stuff |

After the HD-DVD key debacle you’d have thought that the people at Digg would have learned. In case you don’t know (where the hell have you been for the last few weeks?) Someone cracked the encryption on HD-DVD’s and published the key on their website, which was then dugg. The offending article was removed by Digg because someone set the lawyers on them, then the mob found out. This was why the hex key was plastered everywhere for a couple of days (I posted about it, though admittedly not in much detail). Everyone (or nearly everyone) posted something with the key in it, Digg listened to their users and agreed not to censor posts again and take the legal consequences.

Now we have a new scandal in the making, according to Neil Patel over at Pronet Advertising Digg are internally burying stories they object to. Now I personally can’t see why the story Patel references would be buried, unless it is for some nefarious corporate reason (which just makes the fact that they did it worse) but if it turns out that this is happening as part of a deliberate strategy then Digg are going to lose in the long run. People use digg because it tells us what people are interested in as a tool for marketing it is invaluable, through sites like Digg we denizens of the web can get an instant snapshot of what’s hot and what’s not. People trust it because it reflects the voice of the people.

I use Digg to find out what the latest buzz in the videogaming world is for my posts over at Gaming Moments, granted alot of it is rubbish but then I only use a feed reader to check the latest posts, I should really check the site itself to see what people are digging, but I may not do that now. If Digg are covertly burying posts in an effort to censor its users then I can see people dropping it as a reliable source of news and going elsewhere. This may be the beginning of the end for Digg.

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