Digg — Kevin Rose’s reboot of his once-popular link-sharing website — is shedding a large portion of its employees, the corporate introduced on Friday. The startup shouldn’t be closing, nevertheless, Digg CEO Justin Mezzell stated. As an alternative, 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 provide an alternative choice to current neighborhood boards, the place folks might publish and share hyperlinks, media, and textual content, and interact in topical discussions. However whereas Digg had intelligent concepts on learn how 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 net is extra bots than folks, Mezzell describes the issue of combating bot spam in a publish on the Digg website.
“When the Digg beta launched, we instantly observed posts from website positioning spammers noting that Digg nonetheless carried significant Google hyperlink authority,” the weblog publish in regards to the layoffs states. “Inside hours, we acquired 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 admire the size, sophistication, or velocity at which they’d discover us.”
The corporate stated it banned tens of hundreds of accounts, deployed inner tooling, and labored with exterior distributors, however it wasn’t sufficient. For a website that relied on person votes to rank content material, an uncontrollable bot drawback meant these votes couldn’t be trusted.
“This isn’t only a Digg drawback. It’s an web drawback,” Mezzell notes.
Mezzell additionally stated that taking up established rivals (possible a reference to Reddit) was too onerous, 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 stated {that a} small crew 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 at the moment 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 12 months, 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 out there for remark.
