We recently learned, thanks to Techcrunch from this article, that Digg, arguably the most influential social news site on the internet, has bowed down to it's users at the risk of being shut down completely.

The story goes like this: Digg, one of the most popular social news sites on the internet, deleted a user's post. The post contained a link to a decryption key that provided instructions for hacking HD DVDs. This stuff happens all the time. Someone posts something that ticks-off a big corporation, the corporation complains and the site removes the offending material. But this time users went crazy. After the story was pulled from the site other users started reposting the story, over and over again. Digg kept deleting them and they kept reposting. It was a kind of war between the users and the Digg Administrators. Finally, after the dust settled, Digg gave in saying,

"... 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."

Corporations had better start getting used to a new reality: the people are taking over.

Will