Just a few months after launching its open beta, Digg has shut down for the time being. The company’s CEO Justin Maizel states on the home page that a few hours after the beta launch he noticed that it was already being targeted by SEO spammers. “The Internet is now, meaningfully, filled with sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts,” he wrote. Apparently, the Digg team was not prepared for the scale and speed at which the bots found the website and began flooding it.
Maizel said Digg banned thousands of accounts and deployed both internal tools and external solutions, but they weren’t enough. He acknowledged that votes and comments could not be trusted due to the amount of bot activity on the website. While Digg has decided to significantly reduce the size of its team, a small number of staff members are staying on to completely rebuild it. He said it is not enough to present Digg as an alternative to existing social networks and community-based websites. “What comes next should be really different,” he said.
The CEO didn’t say how Digg would reinvent itself, but he did announce that its founder, Kevin Rose, is joining the company full-time. Rose bought Digg back last year in partnership with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. At the time, he said he had “a new vision to restore the sense of discovery and genuine community that made the early Web such a fun and exciting place.” Based on what happened with Digg, this is difficult to achieve given the state of the internet today.
<a href