Digg — Kevin Rose’s reboot of his once-popular link-sharing site — is laying off a significant portion of its staff, the company announced Friday. The startup isn’t shutting down, however, Digg CEO Justin Mezzell said. Instead, Rose will return to work at Digg full-time as the company tries to find its footing.
Rose will continue to work as an advisor at investment firm True Ventures, but will make Digg his main focus from here on out.
The startup aimed 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 smart ideas about how to better moderate content and verify that users were who they claimed to be, the company admits it was inundated with bots even in its early days.
Nodding to “dead internet theory,” which claims that today’s web is more bots than people, Mezzell outlines the problem of combating bot spam in a post on the Digg website.
“When Digg beta went live, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still has substantial Google link authority,” the blog post about the layoffs says. “Within hours, we got a taste of what we’d only heard rumors about. The Internet is now populated, to a significant extent, 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 would find us.”
The company said it banned tens of thousands of accounts, developed internal tools and partnered with external vendors, but it wasn’t enough. For a site that relied on user votes to rank content, an uncontrollable bot issue meant those votes were unreliable.
“This isn’t just a Digg problem. It’s an Internet problem,” Mezzell notes.
Mezzell also said that going up against established rivals (possibly a reference to Reddit) was very difficult, calling the competition not just a moat but a wall.
The company didn’t share how many people were affected by the layoffs, but said a small team will continue to rebuild Digg as something “truly different.” The Digg app has been pulled from the App Store, and the layoff post is currently the only content on the Digg site. However, the Diggnation podcast – a video featuring Rose – will continue.
For context, Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian acquired what was left of the old Digg earlier last year, intending to create a site where communities would have more control and ownership than 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. Financing details were not released.
Digg was not immediately available for comment.
