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 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 search 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 an alternative choice to current group boards, the place individuals may put up and share hyperlinks, media, and textual content, and have interaction in topical discussions. However whereas Digg had intelligent concepts on how one can higher reasonable 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 “useless web principle,” which claims at the moment’s internet is extra bots than individuals, Mezzell describes the issue of combating bot spam in a put up on the Digg web site.
“When the Digg beta launched, we instantly seen posts from web optimization spammers noting that Digg nonetheless carried significant Google hyperlink authority,” the weblog put up concerning the layoffs states. “Inside hours, we obtained 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 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, but it surely 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 (doubtless 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 workforce will proceed to rebuild Digg as one thing “genuinely completely different.” The Digg app has been pulled from the App Retailer, and the layoff put up 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 outdated 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 accessible for remark.
