The Community Conundrum

I’ve been around web communities since we invested in Geocities in 1996 and one thing I’ve learned is the community thinks they own the community. And if you are the one who actually owns it, you’d better act like the community owns it or you’ll lose it.

I was reminded of that when I saw the Digg fiasco yesterday. For those who don’t know, Digg took down a user submitted link to an encrpryption code for DVDs.

Forget about what’s right and wrong in this case, the important point is Digg showed that they control the community and will police it.

That’s a big deal. They might get away with that on issues like hate, porn, terror, but not on hacking.

When you get in the way of geeks sharing hacks with each other in a geek community, you’ve done something big.

I think they can recover, but its going to take work. This is their tylenol scare for sure.

Posted from blackberry so no links. Sorry about that.