The revival attempt of the once-popular link-sharing platform Digg has hit a major reset. The company announced on Friday that it is laying off a significant portion of its workforce and removing its mobile application as it restructures operations. However, the startup is not shutting down. Digg CEO Justin Mezzell said the company will continue operating while it works on rebuilding the platform with a smaller team.
As part of the restructuring, Digg founder Kevin Rose will return to the company full-time to focus on rebuilding the platform. Rose will still serve as an advisor at the investment firm True Ventures, but Digg will now become his primary focus. The platform was originally relaunched to provide an alternative to existing online community forums where users could share links, media, and text while participating in topic-based discussions.
Despite launching with new ideas around better content moderation and stronger identity verification, the company quickly encountered a major problem — bots. Mezzell said the platform was flooded with automated accounts soon after its beta launch. Referring to the so-called “dead internet theory,” which suggests that large portions of online activity now come from bots rather than real people, Mezzell described the scale of the issue in a blog post. “When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority,” the company wrote. “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 suspicious accounts, introduced internal tools, and worked with external vendors to control the spam. However, those efforts were not enough. Since Digg relied on user votes to rank and promote content, the heavy bot activity made those votes unreliable. Mezzell acknowledged that the challenge is bigger than just Digg. “This isn’t just a Digg problem. It’s an internet problem,” he said. He also admitted that competing with established platforms, likely referring to Reddit, proved extremely difficult, describing the competition not just as a moat but as a wall. While Digg did not disclose how many employees were laid off, it confirmed that a smaller team will now work on rebuilding something “genuinely different.” The Digg app has been removed from the App Store, and the company’s website currently only hosts the layoff announcement. However, the Diggnation podcast hosted by Rose will continue. The current Digg project began after Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian acquired the remaining assets of the original Digg last year through a leveraged buyout involving True Ventures, Seven Seven Six, venture firm S32, and personal investments from both founders. Funding details were not disclosed.
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