Digg is closing two months after its highly anticipated comeback

Last January, we covered the long-awaited relaunch of the community platform Digg, following a month-long closed beta. Today, Digg’s CEO, Justin Mezzell, announced that the site is offline due to an “unprecedented bot problem.” Here are the details.

A little context

Last March, the original founder of Digg, Kevin Rose, announced that he would meet with the founder of Reddit, Alexis Ohanian, to restart Digg, following their acquisition of the stage in the digital advertising company.

Digg was founded in 2004 and saw huge popularity before slowly losing relevance. In 2012, the company was sold, and its assets changed hands several times before being re-acquired last year.

Shortly after being rediscovered, Digg relaunched as a closed beta and moved to public beta two months ago.

At the time, the company explained that it plans to tackle the problem of fake behavior on social media with a mix of AI and “multiple authentication indicators”.

From our report last January:

With that in mind, the new Digg will use trust signals to detect authentic participation patterns. They will combine multiple authentication indicators and technologies together to combat AI-driven spam, and may even require proof of brand identity before users can join and post to certain communities.

As it turns out, that didn’t work.

Digg hangs up again, promising to come back

Users who tried to access Digg today were greeted with a letter from CEO Justin Mezzell, announcing a “hard reset, and what’s next.”

In it, he admits that the bot problem was worse than the team expected, saying “this is not just a Digg problem. It’s an Internet problem. But it hit us hard because trust is a product.”:

When the Digg beta was launched, we immediately saw posts from SEO spammers commenting that Digg still holds Google’s reasonable link authority. Within hours, we heard what we had been hearing rumors about. The internet is now populated, in part logically, with sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were a part of the world, but we didn’t appreciate the scale, complexity, or speed at which they would reach. We closed tens of thousands of accounts. We’ve included industry-standard internal and external vendor tools. Nothing was enough. If you don’t trust that the votes, comments, and engagement you see are real, you’ve lost the foundation the community forum is built on.

On the other hand, Mezzel says that Digg is not leaving. He says the Digg team will be “severely downsized,” but announces that Kevin Rose will be joining the company full-time to help prepare it for a new relaunch:

A small but determined team steps up to rebuild with a completely rethought angle of attack. Pitching Digg as an alternative to the incumbents was not thoughtful enough. That’s a race we could never win. The following must be really different.

We’re also announcing something we’re excited about: Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder who started the company back in 2004, is coming back to join the team full time. Starting the first week of April, Kevin will be returning his focus to the company he built twenty+ years ago. He will continue as an advisor to True Ventures, but Digg will focus more on him. We couldn’t think of a better person to help figure out what Digg should be.

Mazzel ends his letter by thanking the users and the team involved in Digg’s return, and confirms that their podcast, diggnation podcast, “will continue to record every month while we work on the reboot.”

To read his full book, follow this link.

It’s worth checking out on Amazon