Digg lays off employees and shuts down app as firm retools

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 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 main focus from right here on out.

The startup had got down to provide a substitute for present neighborhood boards, the place individuals may submit and share hyperlinks, media, and textual content, and interact in topical discussions. However whereas Digg had intelligent concepts on higher average content material and confirm that customers had 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 net is extra bots than individuals, Mezzell describes the issue of combating bot spam in a submit on the Digg web site.

“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 submit 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 refined AI brokers and automatic accounts. We knew bots had been a part of the panorama, however we didn’t recognize the dimensions, sophistication, or pace at which they’d discover us.”

The corporate mentioned it banned tens of hundreds of accounts, deployed inner tooling, and labored with exterior distributors, but it surely wasn’t sufficient. For a website that relied on person 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 (possible a reference to Reddit) was too arduous, calling the competitors not only a moat however a wall.

The corporate didn’t share how many individuals had been affected by the layoffs, however mentioned {that a} small crew will proceed to rebuild Digg as one thing “genuinely totally different.” The Digg app has been pulled from the App Retailer, and the layoff submit 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 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 out there for remark.