Digg Lays Off Staff And Shuts Down App As Company Retools

Digg — Kevin Rose’s reboot of his once-popular link-sharing tract — is laying disconnected a sizable information of its staff, nan institution announced connected Friday. The startup is not closing, however, Digg CEO Justin Mezzell said. Instead, Rose will return to activity connected Digg full-time arsenic nan institution tries to find its footing.

Rose will proceed to activity arsenic an advisor astatine investing patient True Ventures, but will make Digg his superior attraction from present connected out.

The startup had group retired to connection an replacement to existing organization forums, wherever group could station and stock links, media, and matter and prosecute successful topical discussions. But while Digg had clever ideas connected really to amended mean contented and verify that users were who they claimed to be, nan institution admits it was overwhelmed by bots moreover successful its earliest days.

Nodding to nan “dead net theory,” which claims today’s web is much bots than people, Mezzell describes nan problem of combating bot spam successful a station on nan Digg website.

“When nan Digg beta launched, we instantly noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google nexus authority,” nan blog station astir nan layoffs states. “Within hours, we sewage a sensation of what we’d only heard rumors about. The net is now populated, successful meaningful part, by blase AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were portion of nan landscape, but we didn’t admit nan scale, sophistication, aliases velocity astatine which they’d find us.”

The institution said it banned tens of thousands of accounts, deployed soul tooling, and worked pinch outer vendors, but it wasn’t enough. For a forum tract limited connected votes from users to find really contented ranked, not being capable to tackle nan bot problem meant nan votes connected its tract couldn’t beryllium trusted.

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

In addition, nan exec said that taking connected nan incumbents (likely a reference to Reddit’s pull) was excessively hard, calling them not conscionable a moat but a wall.

The institution didn’t stock really galore group were included successful nan layoffs, but said that a mini squad will proceed to rebuild Digg arsenic thing “genuinely different.” As of now, nan Digg app is besides nary more, arsenic nan station is nan only point connected Digg’s website. (The Diggnation podcast will continue, however.)

Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian acquired what remained of nan aged Digg past year, intending to build up a tract that focused connected communities wherever moderators and admins had much power and ownership. They accomplished this done a leveraged buyout by True Ventures, Ohanian’s patient Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian themselves, on pinch nan task patient S32. Funding specifications weren’t public.

The Digg mobile app, which offered a personalized provender and others showing trending and apical posts, has been removed from nan App Store. Digg was not instantly disposable for comment.