In fact, that series of stories wasn’t any sort of gaming, malfeasance, or stock manipulation, as everybody who has bothered to look into things has quickly seen. It was only one writer who managed to convince one editor that his speculations were worth submitting to Digg, and then a huge host of people who were intrigued by the ideas.

I thought the speculation was bunkum myself, and would be astounded if Google actually bought Sun (ha!), but spotting bad guys behind every tree doesn’t seem much less harmful to me. After that series of articles hit the front page of Digg, a loosely affiliated group of folks who hadn’t bothered to find out the truth tried to get everybody from Blogcritics.org banned from Digg. Is that human malfeasance? It seems so to me.

The system has issues both ways, and it’s always a balancing act. The fact that banned sites and banned users aren’t publicized, now that’s interesting to me. Suppression of speech is peachy because nobody knows about it, it seems.