Michi Kono

For those of you who missed it, there was a huge scandal over at Digg, a social news website. Here are the highlights of the Digg Scandal of 2007:

• Someone posted a story about an encryption “key” which could be used to break the DRM on HD-DVD media. This story was deleted. A second story was also removed by Digg employees.
• The two users were both banned. Some users who posted the key in the comments were banned.
• Users noticed and began posting copies of the old story, but they were banned for it.
• Users noticed these bans and posted stories about the bans. They were banned as well!
• Kevin Rose explained his actions. No apology.
• This is where it gets ugly. People are outraged this is the only story on the subject that wasn’t getting deleted.
• It becomes public that Digg has accepted money from HD DVD makers before.
• Someone notices Digg counts being reset by admins on stories on the topic.
• Digg.com starts to slow as everybody begins submitting and voting on spam stories related to the key.
• The entire top 10 and the first two pages of top stories becomes a spam fest for bogus stories about “09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0.”
• Kevin Rose decides to stop censoring. No apology, however.

Now, I don’t mean corrupt as in politicians, but, tonight, Digg has certainly crossed some lines they shouldn’t have. What constitutes “corrupt” activity on a vote-based news site? Spiking the vote, of course.

Observe these time lapsed screenshots (source):

(Taken over a 5 minute period)

Notice how the last screen shot has a comment and yet has only 5 votes.

I’m shocked that Digg has sunk to this low. As a company founded on community contributions, I cant believe they would sabotage their own loyal users like that.

It is reported that the counts on these stories were being automatically reset every minute. Judging by the speed that all these censorship ”features” are being rolled out, this may not be the first time Digg has done this. It raises serious concerns about whether or not Digg admins (i.e., employees) have skewed the content that hits the front page in the past. Essentially, it destroys the entire point of voting. Why vote if your vote doesn’t count unless it’s what they want?

Idiots. Whoever made these decisions needs to be fired. These were some of the dumbest business decisions they could have made in response to this crisis. They’ve never had a problem with posts in the past that could have aided in far more potentially illegal activity, but when an article hits their precious Diggnation sponsor, they start censoring. They just destroyed months of hard earned positive PR and user loyalty. It will be interesting to watch the fallout and watch if Reddit‘s traffic goes up as a direct result of this.

Update #2: Wow. Every single story (15 stories) on the front page of Digg is now about the censorship issue. Digg has been OWNED by its users (which it literally is, and should have been). Here’s a short read on how this has completely backfired.

This is rather amusing. Now that Digg tried to commit suicide (click that if you need background information), the staff seems to have relented a little on its censor-spree. However, Digg users seem even more determined than ever to get the word out about the original story — through Digg.

Of the top stories on the site, EIGHT are about the DRM crack (edit, it is now 10, see below):

• DIGG: What’s Happening with HD-DVD Stories?
• HD-DVD key fiasco is an example of 21st century digital revolt
• Was It Worth It, Digg?
• “Digg Banned me for Typing a Number!”
• Digg, this number is MAGIC! 11497989095545517501 (NOT KIDDING. READ DESC.)
• d1af2e56517a7202a1cc087a69c4e296 — md5 of some “random hex values”
• The best mathematical riddle you will see today. Period.
• Favorite new numbers
• Sixteen Hexadecimal Digits Screensaver for Mac OS X

Judging by how things are already moving along, if Digg doesn’t formally apologize soon, we can expect…

• People will start digging anything and everything that has to do with those numbers (already happening)
• People will begin burying stories that have nothing to do with the numbers (already happening)
• People will get bored of the whole thing and move on (to Reddit?) after causing massive damage (see below)

This is the biggest PR nightmare I’ve seen a company have to deal with since the Internet began. Every second this continues, they lose regular users who become disgusted by either the policy or the aftermath (number story spam). They also lose new users who have no idea what’s going on. And finally, this will be a nice big black eye tomorrow morning as a new batch of blogs begin reporting the incident.

Censorship on the Internet is near impossible. It is like trying to plug holes in a damn using a hammer. It’s only a matter of time before you exacerbate things. You’d think Digg would have known that. I mean, even China has a hard time with Internet censorship.

All this to protect a sponsor. I honestly have to wonder what they were thinking when they decided to blanket censor a subject that was legitimate news.

Note: In the time it took me to compose this post, the top 10 gained another story on the topic. Three minutes later, all top 10 stories were now about this topic. Here’s the latest addition. It seems the community has Dugg down all other stories that were there. Supposedly, people are now burying any story that is not about the hex numbers.

This one angers me, even though I have nothing to do with what’s going on.

Recently, someone cracked a key component of the HD-DVD encryption scheme (nerd link) – A magic number that is essentially the DRM password. This allows hackers to circumvent the DRM on those movies. The number means nothing to people like you and me. And on any other day, the story would have died at that.

But the story took a shady turn when Digg users started reporting being banned for submitting news about this now-infamous number. Slashdot, a news site with editors, posted the story. Reddit, a competing social news service, also let those stories fly.

Aside from the legal and ethical issue of whether or not anybody can claim copyright to a number, it is highly concerning that Digg is going above and beyond in censoring this story.

They have also began banning users for:

• criticizing the bans
• submitting caches, mirrors, or other posts on the bans
• submitting caches, mirrors, or other posts on the original topic
• submitting anything related
• trying to submit stories as discussion boards on the topic

The reaction from users is mostly expected: the number of people Digging anything and everything related to the issue is growing like mad. These stories are getting tens of thousands of Diggs in a matter of hours before being deleted. And, thanks to Digg’s actions, people like me are now well aware of what’s happening.

If they had just let the story simmer to the top and fade away at midnight, I would not be writing this right now. I mean, who cares that hackers cracked DRM, right? That happens every day. But for Digg to essentially backpedaled on their entire premise — well that is news.

And then news broke that Digg received a sponsorship from HD-DVD a few months ago. Digg users are pissed. Now, who knows if that’s paranoid speculation, but the truth is that Digg’s competitors are putting up the stories and Digg is ripping them down as fast as possible. People are reporting that stories are being banned within minutes of being submitted, users are getting IP banned, and that entire URLs and keywords are being blocked from submission titles. This is most disturbing because there have been tons of instances in the past where Digg turned a blind eye to illegal material.

And the notion of copyrighting numbers is already insane. So, had the encryption key been Pi, would we not be able to post Pi anywhere? Clearly, that’s not true. This whole thing stinks of DMCA takedown abuse. And Digg bent over to receive it. Now a whole lot of people are angry with Digg, especially some of its most loyal and committed users who are reporting this issue.

It’s a Digg Revolt, folks (that story won’t show up in any of the top 10s). Read the comments for lots of angry people threatening to quit Digg. Well, I like Reddit more anyway, but now I have substantiated proof as to why.

If YouTube taught us anything, it’s that the DMCA requires reactive, not proactive, policing. Digg was in no legal trouble so long as it was responding to the DMCA requests it was getting, which asked nothing of banning users, and certainly couldn’t have specified newer submissions. They went above and beyond in trying to bury this anti-DRM story. Nobody forced their hand here.

Clearly, Digg follows the “community decides with their votes” mantra only when it doesn’t offend their sponsors.

Yesterday, Yahoo bought Right Media for $680M. Clearly, Yahoo is still fighting for that lucrative search pie. But in the meantime, they also lost Andrew Braccia, the VP of consumer web search. Braccia was a crucial figure in bringing in Flickr and del.icio.us, which to me highlights two facts:

• A key search engine executive earned his stripes doing non-search engine stuff
• The search engine executive left

I’m not against Yahoo doing search. I’m not even against them abandoning it for social media. What bothers me is their everything-at-once mentality.

In the 90s, it was about directories, which are about categorization and human interpretation. Then search came along, and it’s about logical results that are pure algorithms. Finally, social media jumped in, and it has everything to do with human bias.

So, of course, I see potential issues with Yahoo trying to make the best search engine possible while trying to claw their way into social media. These two goals involve two totally different types of thinking, which clearly their executives have failed to capitalize on.

Right now, Yahoo has the MySpace bug, which is the disease big companies get when they have all of the “eye balls.” As in, since everybody visits their website, they think they can steal all the related markets. While this is true, unlike real life monopolies, it’s impossible to force consumers to come back to your website. Thus, as you shove all your crappy services down their throat, you inadvertently harm your image and lower the over all quality of your product.

And if people think your product is a “me too”, then you’ll never be as good as whatever it is people think you are trying to become (Google). If Yahoo wants an edge on Google, they should have invested the money that went into Panama (their search engine) and put it into their social properties. They have all of the related sites in place to build an awesome social portal, or they could have even taken a shot at a social search engine of some sort.