09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0
Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…
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.
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.
Digg on,
Kevin
After this was posted the topic was swarmed with diggs and then the internet was consumed by this code. From songs to shirts to facebook groups to the digg story with over 34,000 diggs.
For those who don’t know, this is the key to decrypt HD-DVD on a linux machine and rip the DVD to your PC. I don’t think 99% of the people who dugg it would even know how to use it, but if you do go ahead before the internet is shut down for breaking the DMCA
As for now, I leave you with a dancing Cali Lewis.
Fight on!
May 30th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
[...] Claiming that a website has any control of the community that develops around it is insane, just with the Digg case earlier this month, if you piss off your community then you are going to get backlash. There are people dependent on [...]