May 02, 2007
THE world's most popular technology news website collapsed today after a revolt by its users.
Digg.com was unavailable this afternoon after users began attacking the site after it censored stories reporting how to hack high-definition DVD discs.Digg is a so-called "social news" site that publishes stories and ranks them according to votes by its users. It accounts for 1 per cent of the total internet traffic in the US market.
When the DVD hacking story was taken down, users rebelled and began re-submitting the stories by the thousands.
The site soon collapsed under the weight of the attack.
But Digg founder Kevin Rose, who made the decision to pull the reports off the site, later joined users in agreeing to not allow censorship in the future.
"After seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear," Mr Rose said on his blog.
"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."
"Key fun"
The third most-popular story on Digg today was titled "Every single story on front page is the key", referring to stories with the controversial code that were ranked prominently on the website.
Digg users control the placement of stories on the website through a voting system, where stories with the most votes are displayed first. The story mentioned above gathered 6096 votes.
A blog on TEXYT linked to from the website claimed the founders of Digg had previously accepted sponsorship from a company called HD-DVD Promotion Group.
According to the blog, an online video program run by the site's founders Mr Rose and Jay Adelson was sponsored by the group and the HD-DVD logo was displayed at the start of one episode as a "pre-roll" advertisement.
Such claims angered Digg users even more. Another story in the top ten most-popular list had the title "HD-DVD key fiasco is an example of 21st century digital revolt".
Change of heart
Eight hours before Mr Rose announced Digg would stop deleting stories containing the code, the website's CEO Jay Adelson said the site would comply with requests from a company who produces HD-DVDs.
"We've been notified by the owners of this intellectual property that they believe the posting of the encryption key infringes their intellectual property rights," Mr Adelson said.
An anonymous poster on another website said the "Digg oligarchy wants to wash its hands of this matter and try and pass it off as though it never happened.
"Submitters of the code have been banned… people questioning the bans have been, well, banned."
Another user, Penix, voiced his displeasure just hours after the site started pulling the stories.
"Kevin Rose is a sellout. F... Digg."
news.com.au