Pirated e-books via Digg.com

[Alexander Turcic]

The social bookmark engine Digg received a lot of praise lately, with some people calling it a Slashdot killer. To be honest, I think it's more hype than substance. Digg's supposed strength is also its main weakness: lack of moderation. Thus, it doesn't surprise us that someone has now posted a link to an Iranian-hosted e-book warez site. This post has received over 430 "diggs", or stored bookmarks, within the first five hours, still growing.

Shouldn't large communities such as Digg be held responsible for not integrating better administrative/moderation efforts?

[Pride Of Lions]

Originally Posted by Alexander

Shouldn't large communities such as Digg be held responsible for not integrating better administrative/moderation efforts?

Even small communities should be held responsible for their lack of moderation. The problem I have is when moderators mod posts that don't disagree with their personal beliefs, rather than just keeping out illegal links.

Ideally, of course, we should all be responsible for our own posts and moderate ourselves. The moderators' jobs then would be just to keep the website from being sued. Stifiling communication, however, shouldn't be one of their jobs.
POL9A

[TadW]

Too much moderation sucks. No moderation sucks too. Now, as far as I understood the idea behind Digg, it is the whole community who is charge for moderating content. Of course, if the whole community is a bunch of pirates happily spreading links to pirated e-books, then what should have been moderated becomes promoted instead.

[MatYadabyte]

There is also the issue as to why the site has "Ads by Goooooogle". Is that legit?

[TadW]

Nope. Not legal. From the Google Adsense policies:

Site may not include: [...] Any other content that promotes illegal activity or infringes on the legal rights of others [...]

[Brian]

I'm starting to dislike digg more and more as I'm starting to see a significant number of posts to either:

1. Extremely outdated stories

2. Irresponsible propoganda

3. "Stories" with very little substance that appear to be nothing more than a way for people to attract digg traffic to their own blogs (that have Google Adsense ads, BTW) like this one and this one.

Whatever digg is doing for moderation (nothing), it doesn't appear to be working. The quality and credibility of the stories at digg is sorely lacking and quickly declining. Communities have to moderate and police themselves, and when they don't, they'll quickly break down.

Originally Posted by TadW

Too much moderation sucks. No moderation sucks too. Now, as far as I understood the idea behind Digg, it is the whole community who is charge for moderating content. Of course, if the whole community is a bunch of pirates happily spreading links to pirated e-books, then what should have been moderated becomes promoted instead.

After watching an episode of The Broken where Kevin Rose (one of the creators of digg) openly endorsed piracy, I wasn't that surprised that links to pirated e-book sites were "dugg".

Brian

[TadW]

Check out http://www.digg.com/reported

You can see all "reported" entries, and hopefully someone will go through them and make sure that items such as the pirated e-book item from above will disappear.