The firestorm around Digg’s user revolt has mostly focused on the supposed dangers of empowering communities of users (as in this Chronicle piece, where I’m quoted), and whether Digg was right to flip-flop on its original decision to remove the potentially illegal code. Instead, we’re asking a question: what should Digg have done in the first place?
Its lawyers were advising it to comply with the cease-and-desist letter to avoid a lawsuit, but that action potentially undermined the basis of its users’ trust in the service. Beware of business decisions that masquerade as legal issues. You’ll be tempted to defer to your lawyer’s advice. And it’s a good bet your lawyer’s instincts will be wrong when it comes to fostering open, two-way dialog with your customers. It’s more likely they’ll enmesh you in a battle of wills with the very people you depend on to grow your business.
Whatever the “right” decision was for Digg regarding whether or not to delete the offending post, Digg knows it is nothing without its passionate and participating members. The enlightened path should have been obvious to them: be completely transparent with users from the beginning. Before it took any action that stripped power from users, Digg should have shared its dilemma with the community, explained the conundrum and the legal advice it had been given, and then solicited candid feedback via its forum. Debate would have ensued, but everyone would have felt like they were part of Digg’s ultimate decision, even if that was deletion of the code. More than anything, passionate users want to be heard.
These are simple steps that would have turned “us vs. them” into “us and only us”…without having to relinquish control to a “tyranny of the majority.”
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I smell the beginning of the end. If Digg were to have followed your advice they may have kept the good will of their ‘community’ but would still have broken the law (and more blatantly at that). In the end having a large and passionate audience is not enough if that audience is taking you down a dangerous road, legally, or otherwise. What if a private bank account made the front page, or instructions on how to make a poisonous gas? The problem with slippery slopes are that they are an indicator that you’ve gone down the wrong road in the first place.
This is the best analysis of this issue so far…
This also harkens to a simple concept known as “Fair Processâ€. HBR published a piece ten years ago titled “Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy†that essentially states what is common sense; people want to understand the process by which decisions are arrived at and feel that those processes are fair and transparent. What is remarkable is that the study found that the process is more important than the decision… In other words, it is generally more important to people that the process is fair and transparent than that whether the outcome favors them.
Digg has totally missed the point and taken this as some call to arms for the freedom of information and fighting “the man” – when in my opinion, this is about the lack of transparency in their own business decision-making. Thanks for the insightful post.
Fighting abuse is daily routine of Digg including banning accounts and deleting links. It was impossible to predict that deleting that particular listing and banning a few user accounts would cause such uproar. However, you made one interesting point – maybe socialnetworking sites should inroduce some open mechanism of censorship accounting users opinion.
I think Digg’s fundamental problem is that, long before this happened, their “passionate users” actually hated Digg. At the first sign of trouble they were ready to destroy the site.
Your advice about transparency would have helped, but they would have had to start following it long before yesterday.
@Morris: To quote Churchill, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
I don’t believe there is anything illegal in publishing the details of internal decision-making, including how to respond to cease-and-desist letters. In this case Digg could have bought enough time to have taken this step. It’s true that in some instances (such as the one you mention with the bank account) action may have to be swift and unilateral, but these are generally non-controversial. And there’s no reason why they couldn’t expose all instances of censorship and deletion in some form. Again, the idea of transparency is to avoid being coerced by a “large and passionate audience” by involving that audience in the process. As Josh points out above, it is “more important to people that the process is fair and transparent than that whether the outcome favors them.”
My suggestions about transparency are meant for all businesses, not just social Web sites like Digg. On the Web customers of any company have the means to make themselves heard. Just talk to the many local businesses that are now at the mercy of Yelp’s amateur reviewers.
if only there was a platform that enabled this kind of dialog between companies and their users…
They could have just switched two numbers in the middle of the code and no one would have probably noticed…
But I think you have a good idea.
And I agree that many users of Digg are just chomping to bring it down so they can brag and claim they have “power”.
@Morris: I hardly think that discussing the legal dilemma among the community constitutes an illegal action. Oh, and btw, you can mix bleach and ammonia to make a poison gas, big deal.
Nice summation Thor, and I agree with the premise that as much communication in real-time as possible is crucial … though I do think it’s easier said then done sometimes.
However, wasn’t this blog entry to their community by Jay pretty forthcoming about their conundrum? Or was it after the problem had already blown up? They don’t have comments in the blog, but I’m sure they have plenty of other channels for communicating with a lot of members. I would also suspect they had direct communication with lots of trusted members during this time and were testing the community temperature as best they could.
In the end the rules and norms are only as respected as the members feel like. I do think if they had tried to curtail their members’ mob-like activities on the sites that got dugg over the last year, and encouraged more civil behavior, they wouldn’t have felt that mob turn on them.
However, I do think they did a good job of bending and not breaking entirely when the pressure cooker was about to explode. I wrote about it here: When the Campers Take Over The Summer Camp. I also think their legal defense will be pretty easy due to the appearance of that key sequence on far too many sites to make it a meaningful loss to Sony. (But, I’m no lawyer)
Finally, companies will do well to have you advising them when they have such problems. The more internal emotion you can take out of a big community issue the better your chances are of doing the right thing.
@Ted: Great points, Ted, and you’re so right that it’s easier said than done. Jay’s post was indeed published after the deletion, which is the first difference in approach to what I’ve recommended. The second difference is that they should have invited the audience to express themselves in a candid way. It could have made all the difference if they’d given the community a release valve earlier.
If the owner/moderator of a site cannot set limits as to what is allowed on that site, then the ‘community’ will be happy to trash it. Digg is the perfect example.
Digg has a big problem with community members behaving badly (burying posts that some of the community don’t like rather than allowing the popularity of each post decide rankings) and the owner has been letting them get away with it either out of laziness, fear of reprisals or similar political leanings. The community then surmised that they could do as they pleased.
Like spoiled children with no parental authority.
@Valerie: Interesting point, though I don’t think communities are “happy to trash” their environment at all. With the right tools for self-organization — think Wikipedia — we’ve seem them work with no outside censorship at all. Your notion of ungoverned communities as a violent, anarchic horde (i.e. the “spoiled children with no parental authority”) is the prelude to authoritarian rule, and I hope we’d agree this a dangerous path to go down. Fascism is out of fashion for good reason.
Of course, businesses should retain their right to self-determination. But they don’t and never will own their customer communities. The only option is true engagement.
I think your point is a great one. Greater transparency could have made this a much smaller deal.
I would have actually taken it further and posted the letter and encouraged people to contact the company that sent the notice to express their displeasure. That would have focused all that energy on the real target instead of the Digg moderators.
I just wanted to say that I really appreciate your whole philosophy/approach to online communities. I’m a latecomer to all this. I haven’t really participated much in social sites yet. So much of the interaction I came across was just catty or dumb or fake-feeling. Your posts (and other wonderful things I’ve come across recently) remind me to keep looking. It’s nice to know there are others out there looking to really communicate and be authentic.
I felt this perspective was short-sighted, and that people are generally able to accept decisions they don’t like, if they’re involved in the process and understand all the data. I haven’t had data to support this until last week, when I read the comments in this post, detailing the recent community revolt on participatory media site Digg involving the publishing of a key that decrypts HD-DVDs.
Hello!
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See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo
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[...] How Digg could have avoided a community revolt at Demand Satisfaction! (tags: getsatisfaction digg revolution community lawyer hddvd) [...]
[...] How Digg could have avoided a community revolt [...]
Users are revolting…
Whatever the “right†decision was for Digg regarding whether or not to delete the offending post, Digg knows it is nothing without its passionate and participating members. The enlightened path should have been obvious to them: be completely transp…
Digg’s Decision and Bad Advice
Not to go completely against the general flow of the blogosphere general consensus regarding Digg and the AACS issue, but…
[...] How Digg could have avoided a community revolt Before it took any action that stripped power from users, Digg should have shared its dilemma with the community, explained the conundrum and the legal advice it had been given, and then solicited candid feedback via its forum. (tags: digg community censorship comments socialmedia law) 802 [...]
[...] 84.4% – Global warming is real and caused by human greenhouse gas emissions. 97.4% – Our government won’t do anything about it until it is too late. 99.2% – Guys with the middle name “Wayne” should be avoided. 79.9% – The Digg revolt was one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time. 89.0% – Nothing will happen to websites that publish the HD-DVD key on their site. 99.6% – It is 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0. 77.8% – It doesn’t work anymore, anyway. 88.7% – More people have published the key than own an HD-DVD player. 62.3% – Digg could have handled it better. 92.5% – Our cat is very selfish. He only cares about what he wants. 85.5% – The Kennedy assassinations were a coop carried out by the CIA and the Mafia. 76.6% – That will be common knowledge in twenty years. 98.9% – The world would be a better place if everybody used percentages. 98.0% – Time Magazine’s readers picked Rain as the 2007 most influential person. 99.4% – They are wrong. 87.4% – I don’t know who Rain is. 52.6% – I won’t go out of my way to find out. 67.7% – It’s Prince. 98.3% – I’ll find out whether I want to or not. 96.8% – I had pizza for lunch. 99.9% – Karl Rove should be in prison. 99.7% – Patton Oswalt’s Dukes of Hazard bit is awesome. 72.9% – You’ve had enough of this list. 96.7% – I’ve had enough of this list. 60.4% – I’ll write about this again at some point in the future. [...]
[...] The folks over at Satisfaction have a great post looking into the Digg revolt from earlier in the week. Lots has been written about it and obviously more will continue. [...]
[...] I felt this perspective was short-sighted, and that people are generally able to accept decisions they don’t like, if they’re involved in the process and understand all the data. I haven’t had data to support this until last week, when I read the comments in this post, detailing the recent community revolt on participatory media site Digg involving the publishing of a key that decrypts HD-DVDs. [...]
[...] How Digg could have avoided a community revolt Bookmark this Connotea del.icio.us Digg it Furl Google ma.gnolia Netscape Spurl RawSugar reddit Shadows Simpy StumbleUpon Yahoo MyWeb [...]
[...] L’AACS vient de découvrir en même temps qu’il est vain de mener une bataille en se fondant sur une technologie qui sera toujours déjouée et que le recours à des avocats qui appliquent les recettes traditionnelles peut être catastrophique à l’heure des usagers connectés en réseaux . [...]
[...] Se o caso do fiasco da chave de proteção criptográfica do HD-DVD no Digg nos servir de lição, aprendemos que não se podem tomar decisões precipitadas de cima para baixo e esperar que sua comunidade reaja numa boa. Na MetaFilter eu administro um fórum inteiro devotado a discutir o próprio site. Lá eu lanço novas idéias e novos aperfeiçoamentos de UI e qualquer um pode começar um tópico sobre algum aspecto do site. Quando tenho que tomar uma decisão difÃcil, menciono isso em um novo tópico, recebo a reação dos participantes e geralmente configuro o resultado final baseado nesses feedbacks. Como o blog Satisfaction descreveu, se Kevin Rose tivesse postado alguma coisa dizendo “ei, estamos entre num impasse – estamos ameaçados por uma ação legal a respeito de uma mensagem e gostarÃamos de removê-la para cumprir a ordemâ€, ainda teria havido uma certa gritaria (e é por isso que existem coisas como o Chilling Effects), mas não teria chegado nem perto da reação que eles sofreram. [...]
[...] It keeps happening: high-profile online communities revolt after being “disrespected” by their host sites. There was the infamous Digg imbroglio, of course, and in the past few weeks there were flare-ups at Flickr and JPG Magazine. In Flickr’s case the deletion of a photo (and associated comment thread) led to escalating accusations of censorship. Simultaneous to this, 8020 Publishing, publisher of JPG Magazine, was publicly accused by its co-founder and fired community manager, Derek Powazek, of mistreatment. The result was an escalating solidarity movement of JPG members who ditched the community alongside Derek. In each cases, the company’s response was delayed, further fomenting the anger of the crowd. Flickr’s Stewart Butterfield effectively defused their situation with his response full of humility, transparency and a policy change. 8020 had a harder time overcoming their backlash with this polite but terse response. [...]
[...] A few months back I gave some unsolicited advice to Digg after its users rebelled against the company’s decision to comply with a DMCA takedown notice. My point then was that Digg could have avoided relinquishing control of their business if they’d defaulted to greater transparency; specifically they should have engendered a dialog with their customers prior to making their decision. My point was that this transparency and conversation would actually enable them to retain *more* direct control over their business then they could by maintaining an opaque process. As it turned out, they were coerced into reversing their business decision, effectively ceding the management decision to an angry mob of users. [...]