Over the past day and a half, quite a bit has gone on with Digg. I’m not going to rehash it here because I think that everything that needed to be said has been said (over and over). Here’s a short version of what happened from Frantic Industries:

First, the short version of what happened to Digg today. Someone posted a HD-DVD cracking key, and the story was removed by Digg’s admins, something which supposedly happens very rarely. However, this time Digg’s community chose not to yield to this decision: they kept posting and posting and posting the same number, and currently Digg’s homepage is literally nothing else than rubble consisting of the said hexadecimal key and angry-mob-style exclamations in the vein of “Digg died today” or “Kevin Rose sold out”.

For a good recap of the issues take a look at these posts:

• How I got banned from Digg
• The reason why Digg removed that story
• What’s happening with HD-DVD stories?
• Digg Surrenders to Mob
• Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

What I wanted to see was how Digg’s main competitors were covering this. As to be expected, reddit is reveling in the controversy. Currently 5 of the top 11 stories on Wired are about Digg. Including one welcoming all the Digg exiles.

Next up we have Newsvine, which has a fair amount of coverage in their Technology section:

Currently both Netscape and Slashdot only have one story prominently featured on their homepage but the Slashdot story has much more user involvement with over 850 comments:

While the Netscape story just has 12 comments currently:

And what about the new kid on the block – MySpace News? I didn’t see any prominent coverage but hey, there are only about 3 votes for all the stories on the homepage combined right now…

Being from New York, some of this just reminds me so much of the Daily News and NY Post reporting on the other’s screw-ups and reveling in them. But Digg is certainly the pack leader with Reddit in second (opinion) so something about Reddit’s coverage reeks of desperation to me. What’s your take?

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