Digg’s limited freedom

I suppose a lot of you saw that the magic numbers for decrypting/decoding HD-DVD’s on Linux got dug to the front page of Digg.com yesterday. Later the same day the link/post got removed (on demand from MPAA I believe). This of course triggered a storm of mirror’s from thousands of digger’s, and as far as I can tell the code is still on the front page.

Not only did Digg suffer from the massive numbers of visitors (actually the site went down for the first time) but they somewhat violated their own mission statement;

Digg is all about user powered content. Everything is submitted and voted on by the Digg community. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote stuff that’s important to you!

By deleting links/posts they’re censoring user powered content that they (or some powerful organization) don’t see fit, which in my opinion makes Digg a less desirable site to visit. The removed information is still available all over the Internet and I don’t think Google has removed any of their links yet…

Update: Digg listened to their community and made a very promising turn today. Read all about it in their blog.

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