Apocolypse Digg: HD-DVD
Its funny what kind of things can happen when you own a community of zealot users. The owners of Digg found this out today, and as I right this, they site has been pulled offline.
So what happened? Someone posted a story containing the HD-DVD processing key, and someone at Digg banned the user. The result: a deluge of HD-DVD stories, most featuring the codes along with stories heavily critical of Kevin Rose.
Whenever you run an internet community you must be prepared to mange a crises. Each audience presents its own set of potential problems, some disasters are easier to contain than others. The results of a “fallout” can vary depending on the niche of your audience, spheres of influence, and the structure of your community. Key members are likely to make an exodus following an event like this but the community itself continues on.
As for Digg, this probably is very good for them. This story is everywhere already including the top of The Drudge Report. I wouldn’t be suprised to see it make TV.
The whole digg riot is not even interesting to me anymore, have you had a chance to go and look at what went down at Wikipedia, or seen all of the stories about this pop up, splash dot, reddit, technorati, all the major players including thousands of little guys have covered this thing like crazy all inside of a few hours.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this made the TV as well, I’ll have to keep an eye open for it, oh and one last note, the TechCrunch article was the funniest about this whole thing.
Comment by Aequitas — May 2, 2007 @ 2:21 am