Kevin Rose had a marvelous idea when it came to creating Digg: steal an existing idea - social news - and dress it up in something geeks like. Give the impression that users have all the power while you make money off their content. Fine, why not, after all we’ve all come across dirtier business ideas. Though with so many users, some risks were taken and now they’re coming back to bite mister revision3 in the behind.

There are at least to major recorded events where Digg banned some of its top stories, then went back, restored them and Rose apologised. That doesn’t work. It’s biting at the trust that users have in Digg and it’s telling them some of the effort they’re putting in the site goes to waste - especially when it has the possibility of damaging Kevin’s business ventures. An unregulated conversation medium, free of censorship and problems? Nope. More like a site that funnels stories to keep us busy. I always found only proto and pseudo geeks to hang around Digg anyway, so it’s more of a way for webmasters to get some nice traffic surges to their website. “Writing for Digg”, as some have called the phenomenon.

So I would personally hope Kev and co. develop a set of guidelines that covers in detail what kind of things are or are not appropriate, and abide by them. Otherwise Digg will lose even more of its reputation and, with that, mister Rose stands to lose a lot of money.