David Emery Online

Revolting

2 May 2007

As you may have heard, yesterday the denizens of Digg revolted on mass. This is – to my knowledge – the first major social network that has faced a full scale uprising from its users.

And they won.

I think this a pretty interesting cross-roads for social networks in general. It’s quite obvious now that once your userbase reaches a certain level, you almost completely loose control of your site. It’s exactly the same problem that is troubling YouTube at the moment, with regards to copyrighted content.

Currently, the way it stands is that YouTube can’t detect and take down copyrighted videos as quickly as they get posted. If for some reason you want a piece of video taken down from YouTube, and your video is popular enough, it’s practically impossible – every time one gets taken down, 3 more spring up in its place. Now, for YouTube this problem may well be surmountable; they claim they have detection software in the works that will be able to detect copyrighted videos at the upload stage, so they’ll never make it to the site.

Sadly for Digg, this kind of filtering technique will never work.

The whole focus of Digg is popularity, combined with credibility. These two things together makes Digg very, very susceptible for problems of this fashion: if a story is very popular, it will jump on to the home page. Now, this is fine up until said story is contentious or law breaking. On most sites, the story would simply get buried or hidden (and this is exactly what Digg did to start with). However, this clashes completely with the credibility aspect of Digg; they’ve fought long and hard to maintain a hands-off approach from an editorial perspective, leaving all of that down to the community which in turn builds the site’s credibility.

Which totally falls down if you start blocking popular stories.

The other aspect to all this is how pervasive the community is throughout Digg – there’s practically no element that is not controlled or created by them. This extends most notably to the comments on each post; not only would Digg need to filter out story submissions with the offending text in, but they’d also have to filter out comments as well. Without stories and comments, there really isn’t anything left.

Digg was faced with an interesting conundrum: keep blocking the text, and loose visitors hand over fist or give in, and face the legal consequences. I think they chose the right option – the second one – but has some interesting ramifications:

What happens next? Is Digg going to get sued (yes, I think) and if they do, will they loose (I think maybe not – following the same tack as YouTube vs Viacom)?

More importantly, what happens next time this happens? Is Digg now a lawless, anything-goes site? If not, where do they draw the line?

On a final note, what this whole event shows is the potential problems that pinning your fortunes on user generated content can lead to; in the end, if you have a community based site, it’s really owned by the community; not you.

I wonder what would happen if something of this nature occurred on MySpace…