Just two months after its grand relaunch, Digg is shutting up shop. Back in January, Digg's original founder, Kevin Rose, once again gained ownership of the website.
The revitalized Digg, which was previously an aggregation website, operated in a similar way to Reddit. Via the website and app, this iteration of Digg gave users the option of browsing through various feeds, which featured posts from the site's various communities.
In turn, users were given the option of joining these communities. As a member of these communities, users were able to post, comment, and "digg" other people's posts, which is essentially an equivalent to upvoting on Reddit. It was launched as an open beta in January.
However, it looks like it all became over too soon.
What happened to Digg?
In a post on X, the official Digg account hinted that staff were laid off, writing: "Tough day. Made some difficult changes to the Digg team. This wasn't about performance - these are brilliant and talented folks. We just haven't found the right product-market fit yet."
Justin Mezzell, the CEO of Digg, expanded on the situation in a statement on the Digg website.
In the statement, he confirmed that he had to "significantly downsize" the Digg team, but insisted that, rather than it being a reflection on their talents, it was "a reflection of the brutal reality of finding product-market fit in an environment that has fundamentally changed."
According to the statement, the main reason for the shutdown was due to an "unprecedented" amount of bots taking up residence on the site. Mezzell explained that while they employed various measures to tackle this problem, none of them were enough.
"When you can't trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you're seeing are real, you've lost the foundation a community platform is built on," he added.
AI bots get the blame
Another reason was the "gravitational pull" of more established platforms — but things aren't over for Digg.
"A small but determined team is stepping up to rebuild with a completely reimagined angle of attack," Mezzell assured. "Positioning Digg as simply an alternative to incumbents wasn't imaginative enough. That's a race we were never going to win. What comes next needs to be genuinely different."
However, Mezzell noted that the Digg podcast will continue and that founder Kevin Rose was coming back to steer the business in a new direction.
"Ultimately, the internet needs a place where we can trust the content and the people behind it," the statement concluded. "We're going to figure out how to build it."
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