Digg lays off staff and shuts down app as company retools | TechCrunch

Digg — Kevin Rose’s reboot of his once-popular link-sharing site — is laying off a sizable portion of its staff, the company announced on Friday. The startup is not closing, however, Digg CEO Justin Mezzell said. Instead, Rose will return to work on Digg full-time as the company tries to find its footing.

Rose will continue to work as an advisor at investing firm True Ventures, but will make Digg his primary focus from here on out.

The startup had set out to offer an alternative to existing community forums, where people could post and share links, media, and text and engage in topical discussions. But while Digg had clever ideas on how to better moderate content and verify that users were who they claimed to be, the company admits it was overwhelmed by bots even in its earliest days.

Nodding to the “dead internet theory,” which claims today’s web is more bots than people, Mezzell describes the problem of combating bot spam in a post on the Digg website.

“When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority,” the blog post about the layoffs states. “Within hours, we got a taste of what we’d only heard rumors about. The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn’t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they’d find us.”

The company said it banned tens of thousands of accounts, deployed internal tooling, and worked with external vendors, but it wasn’t enough. For a forum site dependent on votes from users to determine how content ranked, not being able to tackle the bot problem meant the votes on its site couldn’t be trusted.

“This isn’t just a Digg problem. It’s an internet problem,” Mezzell notes.

In addition, the exec said that taking on the incumbents (likely a reference to Reddit’s pull) was too hard, calling them not just a moat but a wall.

The company didn’t share how many people were included in the layoffs, but said that a small team will continue to rebuild Digg as something “genuinely different.” As of now, the Digg app is also no more, as the post is the only thing on Digg’s website. (The Diggnation podcast will continue, however.)

Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian acquired what remained of the old Digg last year, intending to build up a site that focused on communities where moderators and admins had more control and ownership. They accomplished this through a leveraged buyout by True Ventures, Ohanian’s firm Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian themselves, along with the venture firm S32. Funding details weren’t public.

The Digg mobile app, which offered a personalized feed and others showing trending and top posts, has been removed from the App Store. Digg was not immediately available for comment.