When Users Take Over the Asylum - Digg and DRM

I'm sure that most people have heard about the brouhaha over at Digg yesterday, but if not, the BBC News has fairly unbiased synopsis of what happened. Mine, I'm sure, will be much less unbiased. The entire Digg community seems pretty proud of themselves today, having shown "The Man" who was boss, and crowing about the news coverage that the stunt has generated.

What really happened, however, was that a mob overtook an online community to suit their own purposes. And I'm sorry, kids, but it was no Boston Tea Party. It wasn't even new.

Back in 2001, a little site called Epinions decided to remove the rights of contributors. Content writers were no longer able to edit or remove their reviews, and the community retaliated, posting inflamatory reviews that were, for the most part, obscene as part of a mob movement they called EBD, which stood for "Epinions Bl*ws Dogs." The Powers That Were back-pedalled, gave users their rights back, and all was relatively happy again in the Epinions universe. Epinions was 2.0 before there was 2.0, with user-generated content, a community rating system, and they even pay contributors according to a super-secret algorithm that's never been shared to prevent gaming the system.

The difference between yesterday's Digg fiasco, which actually brought the site down for a period of time, and the Epinions EBD incident was what was being protested. With Epinions, users were protesting losing intellectual property rights to their work. What were the users of Digg protesting?

This isn't the first firestorm on a social community; MySpace users have been protesting the banning of widgets that advertise other companies, and users were able to at least get their Photobucket videos back after a brief ban based on Photobucket slide shows containing ads.

The problem with both of these issues is that Web 2.0 users seem to forget that online communities don't exist solely for their benefit. There are two big issues at play when it comes to these sites are money and laws. When it comes to prohibiting other sites from advertising, why would it make sense for another company to get free advertising on your site? Server space and bandwidth aren't free, much as the general MySpace user would like to think it is. Someone has to pay for that, and if the users want free service, they are going to depend on the site's advertisers to foot their bill.

When it comes to the Digg situation, they were stuck. No one wants to censor their members. But when it comes to a threatened legal action, what would the users rather have happen? Digg delete an article or have the site shut down and dragged through the court system. No matter what your feelings on DRM, posting the code was a violation of U.S. copyright law. Providing links to that code puts Digg in an unenviable position. Sure, the MPAA most likely won't take the time and energy to go after individual posters, but a large site providing several links? All anyone has to do is look at what the RIAA has been doing when it comes to shared music files to see where the court system ends up.

So while Digg users are waving their pom poms at each other, all they really proved was that if enough people decide to act like petulant children, they can cripple a site that they enjoy using, put them in possible legal jeopardy, and force the tech folks at the site to try to deal with the site load. What they forgot is that Digg is a real company with real people working there who had to deal with the users' collective temper tantrum over a posting that really shouldn't have existed in the first place.