This is insanse! Digg in full effect.

It seems that yesterday was a crazy day for Digg. If you’re not up on the controversy, here’s a good place to catch up. Go on, I’ll wait.

In my opinion, there is a reason we have a representative democracy. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than the alternative. Not only is it nearly impossible logistically to allow every citizen to vote individually on every issue, but the vast majority of the citizens have proven that they are not capable of comprehending the issues. Just look how close the last few elections for President have been.

No, I’m convinced that every Digg user who posted or dugg stories containing the hex code did so without thinking about the consequences . No, not for themselves. Not much could possibly happen to them individually. Their account gets banned? Their post/comment gets removed? Big deal. However, the bigger issue is not whether Digg has the right to remove their posts (which obviously violate the Terms of Service), but the fact that Digg is susceptible to a revolt by the very users it gives the democratic power to.

I’m not even concerned with the issue about the hex code itself and what it’s for. Post it wherever you want: blog posts, t-shirts, coffee mugs, whatever. This worked for the DeCSS and proved their point quite well. The bigger story here is that when Digg received requests to take down the offending content, they had to comply. It’s the law. There is a process to follow which allows the website owner to say, “No this doesn’t violate copyright, put it back up” and the next step is to go to court. Digg community never gave this process a chance to work.

So, this morning I saw that Kevin has given up and will stop deleting posts and comments containing the code. Sure, it’s a great idea to stop the revolt, but it must have taken a lot to admit defeat. The site is his baby and he strongly believes in democratic news and it turned on him, after all. I hope he quietly starts deleting the posts after the heat about incident dies down. Show ‘em who’s boss!

Digg is a great concept and for most things, it’s fine to let the community to pick the important topics (though my opinion of the digg community is the subject of a whole other post), but this faceless mob clearly decided their interests were greater than that of Digg’s. They won, I hope their happy. Now Kevin needs to build in safeguards against this kind of revolt for the next time. There will be a next time, I guarantee it. The mob will be embolden by their success.