Kevin Guidry wrote:
Compare with the similar experience Slashdot went through several years ago when Jon Katz announced that he was going to (or perhaps already had done so - can't recall) publish users' comments in one of his books without attribution or permission. That seemed to be more of an ownership and copyright issue than a "selling out" issue but if your assertions are correct then there are some similarities.
For /. ownership and copyright was the big issue (I was involved in that to a degree, in fact I think my first ever /. comment was to that posting.. *sniff* MEMORIES!!), but I think the idea underlying that was still this idea of "selling out" users in order to make a buck. And in that was a morality too... /. had always been seen as a "not evil" website, one of the "good guys" who "get it." When Katz announced the book thing, it suddenly made /. part of "The Man" who just wanted to make a buck and didn't care about wider community issues and loyalties. I've seen this in several online communities as well, and the passion that surrounds them fascinates me, almost as much as seeing how so many companies just don't "get it." I was involved with an online comic strip for several years and saw it myself, and ended up as point person at one point having to answer the calls of "sell out!" myself. That's a hard thing to do, because once geeks make up their mind you've sold out... it's hard to recapture their trust (please note that I use geek as a geek myself, and as a positive descriptor :)). Geeks want to see their favourite sites make money so they can stay in business... but there's a fine line in how you can make that money and still stay "true." I think Digg's blog post was a step in the right direction, and I do see the front page of digg starting to recover... but I'll be interested to see if their volume changes over the next month or so. This also reminds me of the DVD-encryption blowup that happened several years ago as well, where the MPAA got some kind of injunction to keep websites from distributing the code (it's been a while and the brain is fuzzy from end-of-semester stress). I love enterprising geeks, instead of electronically distributing the code it was put on tshirts and all other sorts of apparel. I have a great tshirt I got at a convention with the code on it, given away for free. Ah, those were the days. -Christine