Digg lays off staff and pulls app from stores
“When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority,” the blog post about the layoffs states. “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 accounts, deployed internal tooling, and worked with external vendors, but it wasn’t enough. For a site that relied on user votes to rank content, an uncontrollable bot problem meant those votes couldn’t be trusted.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/13/digg-lays-off-staff-and-shuts-down-app-as-company-retools/Open linkView original on piefed.social
15 replies
They launched without any community mod tools beyond "delete post" for their entire run. The site predictably got overrun as site admins had to bear all the weight.
Rookie mistake. The professional move is to officially recognize all those bot accounts actual users and value your company at its height for user engagement. Then either IPO with a quick cash out, or sell to Private Equity and walk away from the zombie company you've just created for it to die off in a year or two.
Yup. Banning a bot account just means another bot will take its place. Shadow ban the bots, count them as actual users, profit.
It got a lot of white supremacists very quickly, and nothing was done to rein them in
Yep, deleted account shortly after they started showing up
That’s the canary in the coalmine
The loser who boasted about raising hundreds of thousands of dollars that he donated to Brett Kavanaugh disgusted me
If I raised that sort of money, my local animal shelter would get every cent
You're a good dude id give you a high five but you know, maybe a bump is more appropriate
I specialise in the inappropriate
Funny stuff. But Kevin Rose is a scammer, his last project was NFT pump and dump.
Meanwhile, reddit be like:
They did all that and it still didn't work out? It is a headscratcher.
reddit barely could keep up witht he bots, although they developed more sophisticated means to block the lowest hang fruits.
Easy way to screen out the bots - just require ID verification /s
How did Digg not already have an app?
They did.