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Digg has shut down, for now, just a few months after its open beta launched. Justin Mezzell, the company\u2019s CEO, has explained on the home page that it noticed hours after the beta launched that it was already being targeted by SEO spammers. \u201cThe internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts,\u201d he wrote. Apparently, the Digg team wasn\u2019t ready for the scale and the speed at which bots found and started flooding the website.<\/p>\n
Mezzell said Digg banned thousands of accounts and deployed both internal tools and external solutions, but they weren\u2019t enough. He admitted that the votes and the comments on the website couldn\u2019t be trusted due to the amount of bot activity it got. While Digg has decided to significantly downsize its team, a small number of staff members has stayed to rebuild it completely. He said it wasn\u2019t enough to present Digg as an alternative to current social networks and community-based websites. \u201cWhat comes next needs to be genuinely different,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
The CEO didn\u2019t explain how Digg will reinvent itself, but he did announce that its founder, Kevin Rose, is joining the company full time. Rose bought back Digg last year in partnership with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Back then, they said they had \u201ca fresh vision to restore the spirit of discovery and genuine community that made the early web a fun and exciting place to be.\u201d Based on what happened to Digg, that\u2019s now harder to achieve with the state of the internet today.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n