dig -Kevin Rose restart of its once-popular link-sharing site – is laying off a significant portion of its staff, the company announced Friday. The startup won’t go out of business, however, said Digg CEO Justin Mezzell. Instead, Rose will return to working full-time on Digg as the company tries to find its footing.
Rose will continue to work as an advisor to investment firm True Ventures, but will now make Digg her primary focus.
The startup aimed to offer an alternative to existing community forums, where people could post and share links, media and text, and participate in topical discussions. But even though Digg had clever ideas about how to better moderate content and verify that users were who they claimed to be, the company admits that it was overwhelmed by bots early on.
Nodding at the “dead internet theorywhich claims that today’s web is made up of more robots than humans, Mezzell describes the problem of combating bot spam in an article. on the Digg website.
“When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed messages from SEO spammers noting that Digg still held significant Google link authority,” the blog post about the layoffs said. “Within hours, we got a taste of what we had only heard rumors about. The Internet is now populated, in large 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 with which they would find us.”
The company said it banned tens of thousands of accounts, deployed internal tools and worked with external vendors, but it wasn’t enough. For a site that relied on user votes to rank content, an out-of-control bot glitch meant those votes couldn’t be trusted.
“It’s not just a Digg problem. It’s an Internet problem,” Mezzell notes.
Mezzell also said it was too difficult to compete against established rivals (likely a reference to Reddit), calling the competition not just a moat but a wall.
The company did not say how many people were affected by the layoffs, but said a small team would continue to rebuild Digg as something “truly different.” The Digg app has been removed from the App Store and the termination message is currently the only content on the Digg website. The Diggnation podcast – a video show hosted by Rose – will continue, however.
For context, Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Rose and Reddit acquired what was left from the old Digg earlier last year, with the intention of creating a site where communities would have more control and ownership by moderators and administrators. The deal was a leveraged buyout involving True Ventures, Ohanian’s company Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian personally, and venture capital firm S32. Funding details have not been made public.
Digg was not immediately available for comment.
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