Somebody set digg up the bomb

Disappointing week. Very slow news week, too. Perhaps that's what led to digg being flooded with stories about how thrilled digg's users are with the HD-DVD hash code that has been circulating the net for the past week. Before I proceed, I have a grammatical question. If you start a sentence with a company who's name begins with a lowercase letter, should you capitalize it anyway? It's a proper noun, and the beginning of a sentence, but I'm still not so sure. I'll capitalize for the sake of grammar.

To summarise the issue, earlier this week the decryption hash for HD-DVD's was found. So for some inane reason, the children that comprise the primary digg user-base thought it'd be a great idea to make a story linking to either YouTube or some blog to let the world know how grateful they were for this decryption key being found. Thousands of stories were hitting the front page, posted by morons who thought they were 1337 haxx0rz because they knew what the number was. Consequently, digg's front page was flooded, and all the real news stories were being buried in the onslaught.
Forget 1337, this week's number is 09.

I don't know why this is new news to the hundreds of mentally-deficient on digg, I've known about this number for a while. In fact, it was posted on digg a while ago, but the story never got enough diggs to hit the front page. Either way, it doesn't matter. Fact: Majority of digg users are stupid jackasses. That is now established.

It doesn't stop there. In response to a letter sent by a legal representative of some company to Digg, Jay Adelson decided the stories needed to be removed from the site. The stories were breaking the law, therefore it was understandable, that a company that operates within the United States must comply to federal law.

HOLD ON! NO IT ISN'T! IT'S NOT UNDERSTANDABLE AT ALL!

Wait, what? How is it not understandable? They have to comply to federal law, fair enough, what's wrong with that?
Batshit loco asshat: becuz digg is democratic so teh ppl shud hav power we shud riot!!!
Yeah right, riot on the Internet. Do you realise how stupid that sounds?
Batshit loco asshat's friend: is not stupid we alrdy hav 20000 other ppl dat want to help us fite teh power!1!!

Yes, the digg users involved in this decided to revolt. They felt they were being done badly by, and had a right to free speech. They felt that digg was abusing their rights, and wouldn't stand for that at all. Therefore, some morons started some blog posts about how they had "15,500+ diggs on [their story], and it just disappeared" and also "I was banned from digg for submitting a news story". Of course with the ridiculous mob mentality/hive mind that is the digg community, these stories got dugg higher than a kite, making it to the front page in minutes. Due to the popularity of these stories, and the comments within the story threads, Kevin Rose posted this:

Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. 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.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Digg on,

Kevin

This seemed to sate the masses momentarily, but all of a sudden, they turned on Kevin. "whaaaa this is a publicity stunt", "omfg the dark tipper never would hav done this to us, you sold out kevin" and "w00t we won".

It's this last quote that irked me the most. "w00t we won". Ahem...

What the FUCK DID YOU WIN?

Are you kidding me? You didn't win a fucking thing. You think you're a grand crusader of righteousness because Kevin Rose posted that? If you do, you are delusional.

Guess what? George Bush forges war in the name of God. Does that mean he's a patron saint? If you honestly believe that you made a difference, then you are bullshitting yourself. Not only that, but these people made fools of themselves. They didn't prove to anyone how creative they are, how intelligent they are, how hardcore they are, how geeky they are, the only thing they demonstrated was how stupid and group-minded they can be. Any sheep can follow the flock. This is why it boggles me, these people proclaiming how they were victorious. Who do they think they were fighting, and which war did they win? If you can tell me that, I urge you to do so.

It's a delusion of grandeur that causes these people to believe they did something outstanding. They want to feel like they made a difference. The reality is they believe this, because they've rarely made a difference before outside the Internet, because in the outside world, making a difference is hard. Well, it's hard in the Internet too, pal. You didn't achieve a thing.
Kevin and the digg team chose to change their response to the stories, but what they did was very planned, and very successful. Jay made an announcement about removing the stories, digg was shutdown for a little while so the stories could be removed, then after a suitable amount of time which let everyone calm down from their adrenaline-based rage, Kevin made an announcement seemingly revoking Jay's statement. It was a tactic, and it worked.

I love digg. I admire Kevin, as well as the rest of the digg team. For such a small company, they've spawned this amazing tool. A website which combines news aggregation with social networking is an innovative idea. I love DiggNation and Revision3, as well as other side projects the Rev3 and Digg teams have worked on (especially SilverOrange, the design team behind Digg. That is some amazing stuff). I've invested a lot of time in digg since v1.0, which is part of the reason it hurts to see these dolts proclaiming victory over a company that they weren't, or at least shouldn't have been fighting in the first place. So that's my take on the situation.

Speaking of Revision3, I took a break from DiggNation and returned to it yesterday, when I found out that The Totally Rad Show (formerly known as the Totally Awesome Show) is all the way to Episode 006! So I had fun watching that, Alex Albrecht really is a fantastic guy and a great personality. It's just brilliant, so check it out.

Another take on the Digg fiasco by John Dvorak <3:
Digg's DVD-Decoder fiasco

Peace