Digg — Kevin Rose’s reboot of his once-popular link-sharing website — is shedding a large portion of its workers, the corporate introduced on Friday. The startup is just not closing, nevertheless, Digg CEO Justin Mezzell mentioned. As a substitute, Rose will return to work on Digg full-time as the corporate tries to seek out its footing.
Rose will proceed to work as an advisor at investing agency True Ventures, however will make Digg his major focus from right here on out.
The startup had got down to supply a substitute for current group boards, the place individuals might publish and share hyperlinks, media, and textual content, and interact in topical discussions. However whereas Digg had intelligent concepts on the right way to higher average content material and confirm that customers have been who they claimed to be, the corporate admits it was overwhelmed by bots even in its earliest days.
Nodding to the “dead internet theory,” which claims in the present day’s internet is extra bots than individuals, Mezzell describes the issue of combating bot spam in a publish on the Digg website.
“When the Digg beta launched, we instantly seen posts from search engine marketing spammers noting that Digg nonetheless carried significant Google hyperlink authority,” the weblog publish in regards to the layoffs states. “Inside hours, we received a style of what we’d solely heard rumors about. The web is now populated, in significant half, by subtle AI brokers and automatic accounts. We knew bots have been a part of the panorama, however we didn’t respect the dimensions, sophistication, or velocity at which they’d discover us.”
The corporate mentioned it banned tens of hundreds of accounts, deployed inside tooling, and labored with exterior distributors, however it wasn’t sufficient. For a website that relied on consumer votes to rank content material, an uncontrollable bot downside meant these votes couldn’t be trusted.
“This isn’t only a Digg downside. It’s an web downside,” Mezzell notes.
Mezzell additionally mentioned that taking up established rivals (probably a reference to Reddit) was too laborious, calling the competitors not only a moat however a wall.
The corporate didn’t share how many individuals have been affected by the layoffs, however mentioned {that a} small group will proceed to rebuild Digg as one thing “genuinely completely different.” The Digg app has been pulled from the App Retailer, and the layoff publish is presently the one content material on Digg’s web site. The Diggnation podcast — a video present Rose hosts — will proceed, nevertheless.
For context, Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian acquired what remained of the previous Digg earlier final yr, intending to construct up a website the place communities had extra moderator and admin management and possession. The deal was a leveraged buyout involving True Ventures, Ohanian’s agency Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian personally, and the enterprise agency S32. Funding particulars weren’t made public.
Digg was not instantly accessible for remark.
