Digg is shutting down—a minimum of for now. Simply two months after relaunching with an open beta, the once-influential social information website says it’s pulling the plug whereas it reassesses its technique.
The announcement got here from CEO Justin Mezzell in a message posted to the site’s homepage. The relaunch has been scrapped, he wrote, and the corporate has determined “to considerably downsize the Digg staff.” As the corporate figures out its subsequent transfer, Mezzell stated, Digg founder Kevin Rose will return to Digg on a full-time foundation beginning in April.
The shutdown marks one other twist within the lengthy, uneven historical past of a platform that after helped outline the early social net. Twenty-two years in the past—lengthy earlier than Reddit, YouTube, or Fb had been dominating folks’s time on-line—Digg was one of many hottest websites on the web, pioneering the idea of customers upvoting and downvoting the tales they favored and loathed essentially the most. Right this moment, although, the positioning has turn into an afterthought for a lot of customers.
Rose was answerable for constructing Digg, in its heyday of 2008, to an estimated worth of $160 million. A 2010 redesign was so unpopular, nonetheless, that the viewers migrated over to Reddit (which provided the same upvote/downvote performance). Rose sold the company in 2012 for simply $500,000.
Final 12 months, nonetheless, he and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian bought Digg back with plans to revive it. Backed by True Ventures (the place Rose is a companion) and Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six, the revived Digg stated it could supply a human-centered expertise.
That has confirmed to be simpler stated than finished. Mezzell, in his be aware, stated the positioning was shortly overwhelmed by bots and AI when it relaunched as spammers seemed to spice up their web optimization rankings based mostly on Digg’s authority, which stays excessive with Google.
“Inside hours, we acquired a style of what we’d solely heard rumors about,” he wrote. “The web is now populated, in significant half, by subtle AI brokers and automatic accounts. We knew bots had been a part of the panorama, however we didn’t recognize the dimensions, sophistication, or velocity at which they’d discover us.”
Mezzell’s feedback appear to align with the “dead internet” theory that has been floating on-line for years. At its core, that line of considering argues that the human-created content material that powered the net within the Nineteen Nineties and 2000s has been changed with artificially created content material. (The argument acquired one other enhance earlier this 12 months with the debut of Moltbook, a social media website designed for AI brokers as an alternative of people.)
On the identical time, Digg stated it underestimated the loyalty customers had constructed up with competing websites. Luring them again after that they had been gone so lengthy proved difficult, particularly because the bots dominated the positioning.
Regardless of banning tens of 1000’s of accounts and placing up extra defenses, Digg was unable to cease the onslaught. Reasonably than letting human customers be duped by the bots, the corporate determined to tug the plug for now.
“When you’ll be able to’t belief that the votes, the feedback, and the engagement you’re seeing are actual, you’ve misplaced the inspiration a neighborhood platform is constructed on,” Mezzell wrote.
Whereas insisting that it wasn’t going away completely, Digg additionally acknowledged that it doesn’t actually know the place it’s going subsequent and didn’t give any estimate for when it could be again. Admitting it had not but discovered the proper product-market match, Digg stated its current Digg podcast will proceed and Rose will hopefully assist them discover a option to assemble a website that may fend off bots and AI brokers and keep true to that human-centric mission mentioned when he purchased again the positioning.
The issue is: nobody appears fairly positive how to do this.
“A small however decided staff is stepping as much as rebuild with a very reimagined angle of assault,” Mezzell wrote. “Positioning Digg as merely a substitute for incumbents wasn’t imaginative sufficient. That’s a race we had been by no means going to win. What comes subsequent must be genuinely completely different . . . Finally, the web wants a spot the place we will belief the content material and the folks behind it. We’re going to determine learn how to construct it.”
