Wow, today I was away from the computer for a few hours; I come back, load up Digg and ALL HELL IS BREAKING LOOSE.

At first I had absolutely no idea why the majority of the stories on the front page were number related – then in about two seconds I figured it out. As you no doubt surmised quicker then me, this is all over the 32-digit decryption code for HD-DVDs. Someone posted a story with the numbers, Digg took it down. Someone else posted the numbers, Digg took it down, and then again, and again, etc.

What we have now, hours later is a full-on revolt. A good number of Digg users are voting anything and everything related to these numbers to the frontpage. It’s actually quite incredible.

We’ve now got stories hitting the front page with descriptions such as:

“Hey Digg Team…go F yourself for banning the cool Moonite ascii art pasting dude. Douchbags.”

I’m going to try and stay neutral on this one, Digg’s CEO Jay Adelson posted his response as to why they were taking down the stories (basically so they don’t get sued or shutdown), which is understandable – BUT it raises some interesting questions. Things I don’t necessarily know all of the answers to, but maybe some of you do.

Since Digg is not actually the ones publishing or posting the stories with the numbers what grounds is there to threaten them to take them down? I suppose in some ways it’s kind of like P2P software, which doesn’t put illegal files out there, but gives a method to distribute them. To me it seems kind of gray. Also consider that there are many other shady stories/hacks that are submitted to Digg all the time that aren’t taken down.

All of this seems to hearken back to the question of whether or not Digg is truly a democratic system. They keep insisting that they are, but the people have spoken – they clearly want these stories with these numbers, and yet Digg is censoring them.

This situation also exposes the power of the “dark side” of social media. Yeah it’s great when good information is being passed around by the crowd, but when something comes up that certain people don’t want to get out, telling the crowd “no” only seems to exacerbate the situation – by a lot.

So what can Digg do about this? Probably not too much unless they want to ban all of the users submitting and Digging these stories OR shut down for a couple of days while this all blows over. If they take that approach however it will likely ruin their “democratic” facade forever.

It’s a tricky, sticky situation, but it’s also really interesting. Digg got a lesson today in the real power of the people.

[Muhammad posted a couple good stories on the situation over at Pronet, find them here and here.]

…and if you want a good visual representation of the madness, be sure to check out Digg’s Stack tool, I’ve never seen such rapid digging of a group of stories…

More on this: downloadsquad | Stuff to Think About | Valleywag | Wired