In January, we discussed the long-awaited relaunch of the community platform Digg. Today, Digg CEO Justin Mezzell announced that the site would go offline due to a "unique bot problem." Here are the details.

A Bit of Context

Last March, Digg's original founder Kevin Rose announced that he would team up with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian after acquiring the platform from a digital advertising company.

Digg was founded in 2004 and gained significant popularity before gradually losing its importance. The company was sold in 2012, and its assets changed hands several times until it was reacquired last year.

Immediately after the reacquisition, Digg was relaunched in closed beta and transitioned to public beta just two months ago.

At that time, the company announced plans to address the issue of fake behavior on social networks with AI and "multiple verification cues."

From our news in January:

With this in mind, the new Digg will implement trust signals to determine patterns of authentic engagement. It will bring together multiple verification cues and technologies to combat AI-driven spam and may require users to prove ownership of products to participate and share in specific communities.

Apparently, this did not work.

Digg Closed Again, Promises to Return

Today, users trying to access Digg were greeted with a letter from CEO Justin Mezzell detailing a "hard reset and next steps."

In his letter, he acknowledges that the bot problem is much worse than his team anticipated and states, "This is not just a Digg problem. This is an internet problem. But it hit us harder because trust is our product:"

When Digg launched in beta, we immediately noticed that SEO spammers were sharing posts indicating that Digg still had meaningful Google link authority. Within hours, we experienced an experience we had only heard rumors about. The internet is significantly filled with sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were in the landscape but did not appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed of discovery. We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We used internal tools and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough. When you can't trust that votes, comments, and interactions you see are real, the foundation of a community platform is lost.

On the other hand, Mezzell states that Digg will not disappear. He mentions that the Digg team will "shrink significantly," but announces that Kevin Rose will join the company full-time for the new relaunch:

A small but determined team is mobilizing to rebuild with a completely redesigned approach. It was not creative enough to position Digg as an alternative to the existing ones. This was a race we could never win. Next steps must be truly different.

Additionally, we are announcing something we are excited about: Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg who started the company in 2004, is returning to join the team full-time. Starting from the first week of April, Kevin will focus on the company he founded twenty years ago. He will continue to advise True Ventures, but Digg will be his primary focus. We couldn't think of anyone better to understand what Digg needs to become.

Mezzell concludes his letter by thanking users and the team that contributed to Digg's transformation and confirms that the diggnation podcast will "continue to record monthly during the relaunch process."

Click here to read the full letter.

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