A Pinoy Blog About Nothing

Happy May Day! Strange thing as I was checking my desktop (21:38 PST). I pulled up the Digg feed and this is all I saw (click for a bigger pic but you get the gist with the cropped one):

This is apparently the community’s response the perceived censorship of Digg’s administrators/editors. The removal of posts containing a controversial string of code which would supposedly crack the encoding of high def discs prompted some Diggers to take action. The Digg editors are accused of removing content based on pressure by the movie industry. The community essentially spammed and then voted up the content containing the code. (Frankly, I couldn’t see how one would go about using that piece of code. Maybe I’m not just that tech savvy.)

Often, I’d just look at submissions at Digg and not the comments which would run from juvenile to offensive snarkiness. This particular event is curious — will this cause Digg to implode, a victim of its own popularity and unique style of social bookmarking? How will Digg respond to this behavior? Are we witnessing an online version of a “no-confidence” vote in parliamentary government? If you’re curious about online community dynamics as I am, this is an interesting case happening right now.

UPDATE: Digg founder Kevin Rose posted this on the Digg blog:

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.

Interesting.