Hell hath no fury like a Digger scorned!

Kevin Rose and the rest of the people over at Digg just discovered that the old saying about women definitely goes for geeks as well. The incident started when the “invisible” administrators started deleting record-breaking stories in terms of popularity over at Digg, and as if that wasn’t enough, they also decided to go ahead and ban most of the people that posted these stories, just to be on the safe side.

As would soon become apparant to the guys over at Digg, there is a fine line with what you can get away with when over a million registered users are watching your every move. Soon after it seems that every active participating member of Digg was submitting a new story containing the content that banned from Digg, and there was no way of preventing it from completely taking over the frontpage. Seconds ago, the frontpage of Digg looked like this:

Every single story in the top 10, and the rest of the frontpage from what I could comprehend, is a result of the mayhem that’s going on over there right now. What puts a bit of an interesting twist on this story is that the topic in question that was swiftly censored at Digg was in fact just a number (09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 - living on the dangerous side today!) that the movie industry has copyrighted. Interestingly enough, HD-DVD is also a rather significant sponsor of Digg, which makes their references to their sudden references to their ToS seem somewhat weak and sporadic at this point.

All of this just goes to show that when you’re dealing with people in charge of the content, you need to be wary of how, when and what you decide to interfere with, and transparency is probably the best approach. In a previous post I stated that the current policy at Digg that lets the moderators delete content at their own discretion doesn’t fit with their image of being a user-driven source for news, and to be honest, I’m quite frankly just surprised that it took so long until something like this happened.