Digg, Kevin Rose’s reboot of the once-popular link-sharing site, is laying off a significant portion of its staff, the company announced Friday. But Digg CEO Justin Mezzell said the startup isn’t going out of business. Instead, Rose will return to his full-time role at Digg as the company works to find its footing.
Rose will continue to work as an advisor at investment firm True Ventures, but will make Digg his main focus going forward.
The startup set out to provide an alternative to traditional community forums where people can post and share links, media, text, and engage in topic-specific discussions. But while Digg had some bright ideas for how to better curate content and determine who its users were, the company admitted that it was overwhelmed by bots even in its early days.
In a nod to the “dead internet theory,” which argues that today’s web is more about bots than people, Mezzell explains the challenges of combating bot spam in a post on the Digg website.
“When Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers claiming that Digg still had meaningful Google link authority,” a blog post about the layoffs said. “Within a few hours, we had a taste of what we had only heard about: the Internet was now a meaningful part of sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we did not appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed with which they could find us.”
The company said it banned tens of thousands of accounts, deployed internal tools and worked with external vendors, but that wasn’t enough. For sites that rely on user votes to rank content, those votes may be unreliable due to bot issues outside of their control.
“This isn’t just a Digg problem. It’s an Internet problem,” says Mezzell.
Mezzell also says it’s too difficult to deal with established rivals (a possible reference to Reddit), calling the competition a wall rather than just a moat.
The company did not disclose how many people were affected by the layoffs, but said the small team will continue to rebuild Digg into something “completely different.” The Digg app has been pulled from the App Store, and the firing post is currently the only content on the Digg website. However, the Diggnation podcast, a video show hosted by Rose, continues.
For context, Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian acquired what was left of the former Digg early last year to build a site that would give the community more moderator and administrator control and ownership. The deal was a leveraged buyout involving True Ventures, Ohanian’s company Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian personally, and their venture firm S32. Funding details were not disclosed.
Digg was not immediately available for comment.
