I would like to comment on one statement you made in your post asking the question of what we learn from this type of event. You said, “One is that you need tighter controls over the content people submit to a site…” I think you hit the nail right on the head with that statement because let me tell you what we learned from this incident…

We have a team of human moderators and content management specialists that manage a number of large communities for a number of global brands and during this Digg incident, it was our fear that users would begin posting the hack and our communities would turn into a big mess of inappropriate content that could not be used.

And sure enough they tried.

Because of the high profile of these communities and the corporate brands that fund them, displaying this type of content is not even an option for fear of legal ramifications.

So what did we do? We reacted with vigilance by managing and moderating every piece of content before it was posted live in the community. Did the communities like this content moderation? No. Are the communities still flourishing today? Yes.

And just as important, our customers are happy too.

What everyone is seeing is the after effects. -

“in seeing things, there are the KAN and KEN:. Penetrating the true nature of things is KAN, seeing the surface phenomena is KEN” Miyamoto Musashi – Gorin-No-Sho.

..and I think that is the art of being a true social animal - !!

Isn’t Ulisis saying that the community is worth keeping?

Even if it’s not a kumbaya moment, that’s what they’re doing. I think that Digg realized the value of what they have, and didn’t want to jeopardize that.

But what you have, actually, is a Web 2.0 company (reportedly worth around $200 million USD) doing a cost-benefit analysis and realizing that losing its user base would pose a higher and more immediate risk than facing the possibility of lawsuits from “a bigger company” (I cannot help but wonder what would happen if the cost-benefit analysis does not favor the users…).

Watching it in real time, it really looked like most people were doing it just to follow the angry “mob”. I’m not saying that there wasn’t a good reason to get mad, but I’m guessing that most people participated for no reason at all.

Then again, digg has a relatively well-defined niche of users (i.e. the male adolescent techie/geeky college student, as illustrated by their “diggnation” podcast), so it is pretty clear that digg is more susceptible to revolts over the deletion of an anti-DRM story than a transgender rights article, for example. As such, the “live by the digg, die by the digg” argument applies very well. In fact, digg even has such a homogenous community that I’ve seen the term “digg” being used meaning either the site or the community. This would never happen for a heterogeneous, more loosely defined community such as YouTube (granted, their social design is not as elaborate as digg’s).

The main argument in my comment therefore is how the digg incident can be generalized to other sites hosting user-generated content, but having a wider demographic of users. For them, “the right thing to do” is harder to find (from a perspective of business, profitability, but also the personal vision for their web application and community building). Once there’s a large chance of the “oppressed minority” being a part of the community itself, preventing a “tyranny of the majority” has to be a concern to the site owners as well, or the risk of the community crumbling is rather large. Ironically, one could argue that the “democracy” within the digg community only works so well because the community is very homogenous, and can harness the infamous “burying” feature to sustain this homogeneity against other users “democratically” submitting deviant stories.

Can we assume that the Digg population is somewhat advanced in that the only situation in which this extreme collective action has occurred was one in which the cause was worthy?

An unregulated democracy completely based on majority decisions (without any explicit or implicit (cultural) limitations of power) is bound to become a tyranny of the majority over minorities, especially culturally defined ones.

This time, it was the users (majority) vs. the Digg & DRM people (minority), and we tend to see the mob action as justified since we all agree that the DRM people are “evil”.

Next time, it might be some poor celebrity’s unlisted phone number or home address (remember when Paris Hilton’s Sidekick got hacked?). Or maybe sexist/racist/antisemtic etc.. articles that people want to digg? Web 2.0 or not, it gets a little bit more complicated here than just looking at majority votes.

The question should thusly be if we are politically and culturally advanced enough to make the right decision in such situations so that a mob cannot form, or if there has to be some sort of external regulation to do this for us. Note that every Western democracy currently employs such external regulations, for example, as a Bill of Rights or as the Human Rights declaration.