CogBlog

It's been interesting to see some of the response to last night's Digg takeover. Quite a few people have said it is an example of mob rule, deplorable, evidence that Digg is not really a "community", and so on.

The interesting part of all this to me is that:

1. It is a lesson in damage control gone awry. Clearly if your entire rights management scheme relies on keeping one bit of information under lock and key, you'll have a very difficult time once that bit of information is released in the wild. And, if your plan is to brand anyone who later passes that bit along a criminal, you'll be again putting yourself in a very bad position, at least from a public relations standpoint. And by doing so, you may just accomplish exactly the opposite of what you intended through your attempts at enforcement.
   
   
2. I think it is interesting that Kevin Rose titled his post with the key. Obviously that is a risky choice, but also in fact the only thing that could have short-circuited the massive wave of copy-cat postings that were rising up the digg ladder--short of just taking the site down. Another example of a kind of rule of opposites of online damage control : heavy handedness fed the fire, capitulation snuffed it out.
   

I'm not saying that I think what happened on digg was right (I'm not exactly sure it falls into the realm of right and wrong).

But, it is an example of something that is particularly despised among programmers, developers, and security types online (a big part of the digg audience), and that is an attempt by a perceived powerful group to protect an inherently flawed system through intimidation, rather than through an improved system. It is analogous to the scenario where a company like Microsoft responds with a threatened lawsuit when a security expert (aka hacker) releases a discovered bug in their code. Most smart businesses (including Microsoft) have figured this out by now, and instead treat it as an opportunity to improve their product and methods.

I think that sentiment is a big part of what fueled the Digg takeover.