Digg Inmates Riot and Warden Kevin Rose Bends Over

Digg this. At some point in time yesterday, a few Digg users started noticing that certain stories that posted encryption keys allowing users to crack and bypass digital rights managements on HD-DVD codes started disappearing quickly from Digg’s main page.

Naturally, this upset the most faithful of the Digg users, who carried out a protest campaign – riot I call it – so successful, that at a certain point all stories on the main page of Digg were about the encryption key that the Digg moderators unsuccessfully tried to remove.

Later, on the same evening, Kevin Rose, the Founder of Digg cited a Cease and Declaration notice that he received to remove the encryption key from digg.com as the reason for the stories getting moderated by his peeps. He then went on to tell the Digg users

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.

This is what bothers me the most about community driven social websites like Digg. The regular users of such sites, who are frequently contributing to the site with no tangible return on their time investment are like prison inmates inside a correctional facility who have unlimited time on their hands. The moderators are like the correctional officers, who are constantly patrolling and keeping the inmates and their actions in check. There is always tension between the two groups. At some point, when the tension brewing inside can no longer sustain itself, a riot will occur.

In the end one of two things will happen as a consequence of such a riot. Either the inmates will be overpowered, brought under control and kept in check; or the warden and the correctional officers will be taken hostage, and the inmates will start to rule.

In case of Digg, the outcome is quite obvious.