Digging The Madness of Crowds
Earlier today, O'Reilly found itself at the center of a controversy on the popular news site, digg.com. Steve Mallett, O'Reilly Network editor and blogger, was very publicly accused, via a Digg story, of stealing Digg's CSS pages.
Context & Ripple Effects
Digg is barely three months into its funded life: it launched at the end of October 2005 as a San Francisco service that ranks Web stories purely by what users vote up, and raised $2.8 million in venture capital within days. Its pitch was that the crowd, not an editor, decides what deserves attention.
Today that crowd decided O'Reilly was a thief. A Digg story publicly accused Steve Mallett, editor of the O'Reilly Network, of stealing Digg's CSS pages — putting a publisher famous to exactly Digg's developer audience on trial in Digg's own courtroom.
First-order effects
- Steve Mallett and O'Reilly face a plagiarism charge broadcast through Digg's ranking system itself, forcing a same-day public response instead of a quiet legal or private exchange.
- Digg's front page becomes the venue for an unverified accusation against one of tech publishing's best-known brands, making the site's handling of contested claims about code a live test of its model.
Second-order effects
- Developers and publishers who publish stylesheets and templates in the open watch how this dispute resolves, since the accuser here needed no editor to reach a mass audience.
- Digg's backers, who put in $2.8 million only months ago, have a direct stake in whether the site can police mob accusations without abandoning the voting mechanism that defines it.
Third-order effects
- If a single voted-up story can indict a named person or company without verification, user-ranked news systems will need governance layers — reputation, review, or correction norms — that pure voting does not supply.
- Platforms that distribute user-made claims start inheriting the defamation and attribution disputes that used to be settled between publishers and their sources.
The trend: Crowd-curated news services like Digg are learning that open voting distributes accusations as readily as stories, pushing young platforms toward moderation and governance structures their founding model never planned for.