Pretty interesting community story taking place on Digg today (as much as I can gather, after Andre showed me):

• user makes a post on digg linking to the encryption key that is used to crack HD DVD protection
• story is pulled, user is banned, then story goes up about banning user (people speculate it’s because HD DVD was an advertiser) update: Ed Felten has a good post about general efforts to take all references to the key off the web
• Two to three thousand people get annoyed/pissed, and start posting and digging all sorts of stories that mention the encryption key in seemingly innocuous ways.
• This continues for the rest of the day, with the entire front page of the site filled with stories leaking the crack

It’s always fascinating when a community (or a country, or a religion, or a group of any size) decides to spontaneously revolt, and it’s even more interesting when it happens in such a short period of time in a distributed medium like the internet. There are loads of stories like this on other sites and in multiplayer online games but I’ve never seen it happen on digg before. I’m curious how many people it took to come up with a reaction and the idea to post the key in other ways — I can see a general mob voting mentality would be easy to gather steam once the posts were up since many people wanted a way to vent their frustration — but I wonder if it was just a dozen or two users that started creating the posts that quickly got to the front page. And finally, what was their method of communication? In-site messaging? IM?

Anyway, I’m certainly a late comer to this story but I’d love to see a wrap-up of it several days from now, when all the details can be figured out.