Digg Your Way Out of This One

Another victory for consumer power yesterday. Digg.com, the world’s most popular technology news website and responsible for 1% of US Internet traffic, announced it would no longer edit stories containing a secret code that people can use to hack hi-def DVD discs. Scared of lawsuits from the big ol’ Entertainment Industry, up until yesterday Digg had been removing the offending code from its users posts. But this is content created by The People, for The People and said People didn’t like it when someone told them what they could and couldn’t write, and so revolted. “We are revolting!” they said. They deluged the website with thousands of posts, so much so that it collapsed under the weight.

Digg founder, Kevin Rose, saw the error of his ways and yesterday reversed his decision to edit the posts containg “the code,” and announced the people were more important than the smelly lawyers. He said in his post on the website: “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.” And what’s more he stuck the code itself in his post. Now that, Kevin, is ballsy. But, really he had no choice. He realized a website that relies on user-generated content is nothing without its users and calculated he could still fend off any legal challenges. And, in doing so, he’s shown (though it took a while) he understands what is important and who has the real power now. Nice one, Kev, we dig that.

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