Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Digg and the Limits of Liberty

Overnight an explosive situation has arisen at Digg, a vast user-generated site. It is, on the face of it, a monument to web libertarianism. Stories are posted in Digg by users and the user body creates a hierarchy of levels of interests by 'digging', basically voting for which stories are the most gripping. Unfortunately, libertarianism at the margins, when the chips are down, is a hard creed to sustain. A code was posted on the site. This apparently decrypts HD DVDs and is, thus, highly commercially sensitive. Digg adminstrators removed the code. This inflamed the users, who promptly started posting it on hundreds of different pages. Digg was forced into a massive programme of deletions. This has, in fact, compromised my ability to provide links as pages, though visible on my RSS reader, are vanishing as we speak. This one seems to be persisting. Even the Wikipedia page has been locked and another page on the issue has been removed. Web libertarianism - as I have recently pointed out - is a fragile, implausible and illusory phenomenon.
Posted by Bryan Appleyard at 7:34 am

6 comments:

  1. I BeatriceMay 02, 2007 9:03 am

    Wish I understood all this a little better, Bryan. If I did I might be able to do you the courtesy of making a reply comment of some sense. Shall keep looking and trying...

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  2. Bryan AppleyardMay 02, 2007 9:05 am

    I'm not sure I fully understand it, Beatrice, but it seems exciting.

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  3. MarkMay 02, 2007 10:18 am

    Thanks for pointing all this out, Bryan. TBH, there may be a simpler way to look at it: Digg just isn't a very interesting site. It seems mostly to contain material of interest to US teenagers - exploding Coke machines and the like. There's already a long-running allegation that a cabal of Digg users is deliberately burying stories they don't like (on Digg, you can vote to "bury" a story: that is, vote to keep it off the site's front page). So: Digg is far more Lord of the Flies than John Stuart Mill. As for posting code that decrypts DVDs, I wonder when Hollywood will realize that betting against the ingenuity of every young person on the planet is a tad hubristic not to mention costly and certain to fail.

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  4. Bryan AppleyardMay 02, 2007 11:56 am

    Well, quite, Mark. I know what you mean about Lord of the Flies. The way in which new technology seems to eat itself - encrypting and then decrypting - is interesting.

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  5. Bryan AppleyardMay 02, 2007 3:55 pm

    Digg seems to have conceded defeat and stopped censoring the code -
    "If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying"

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  6. AnonymousMay 02, 2007 5:06 pm

    Bryan, you might want to update your main article with the observation that Digg have recanted.
    http://blog.digg.com/?p=74

    ReplyDelete

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