Digg lays off staff and shuts down app as company retools

Digg — Kevin Rose’s reboot of his once-popular link-sharing site — is laying off a sizable portion of its staff, the company announced on Friday. The startup is not closing, however, Digg CEO Justin Mezzell said. Instead, Rose will return to work on Digg full-time as the company tries to find its footing.

Rose will continue to work as an advisor at investing firm True Ventures, but will make Digg his primary focus from here on out.

The startup had set out 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 clever ideas on how to better moderate content and verify that users were who they claimed to be, the company admits it was overwhelmed by bots even in its earliest days.

Nodding to the “dead internet theory,” which claims today’s web is more bots than people, Mezzell describes the problem of combating bot spam in a post on the Digg website.

“When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority,” the blog post about the layoffs states. “Within hours, we got a taste of what we’d only heard rumors about. The internet is now populated, in meaningful 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 at which they’d find us.”

The company said it banned tens of thousands of accounts, deployed internal tooling, and worked with external vendors, but it wasn’t enough. For a site that relied on user votes to rank content, an uncontrollable bot problem meant those votes couldn’t be trusted.

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

Mezzell also said that taking on established rivals (likely a reference to Reddit) was too hard, 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 that a small team will continue to rebuild Digg as something “genuinely different.” The Digg app has been pulled from the App Store, and the layoff post is currently the only content on Digg’s website. The Diggnation podcast — a video show Rose hosts — will continue, however.

For context, Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian acquired what remained of the old Digg earlier last year, intending to build up a site where communities had more moderator and admin control and ownership. The deal was a leveraged buyout involving True Ventures, Ohanian’s firm Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian personally, and the venture firm S32. Funding details weren’t made public.

Digg was not immediately available for comment.