GoKawiilLast January, we covered the long-awaited relaunch of community platform Digg, following a months-long closed beta. Today, Digg CEO Justin Mezzell announced that the site is going offline as a result of “an unprecedented bot problem.” Here are the details.
A bit of context
Last March, Digg’s original founder, Kevin Rose, announced that he would be joining forces with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian to relaunch Digg, following their acquisition of the platform from a digital advertising company.
Digg was originally founded in 2004 and saw massive popularity before gradually losing relevance. In 2012, the company was sold, and its assets changed hands multiple times before last year’s reacquisition.
Shortly after the reacquisition, Digg relaunched as a closed beta and moved to a public beta just two months ago.
At the time, the company explained that it planned to tackle the endemic problem of inauthentic behavior on social networks with a mix of AI and “multiple verification cues”.
From our coverage last January:
With that in mind, the new Digg will apply signals of trust to pick up on patterns of authentic participation. They will bundle multiple verification cues and technologies together to fight AI-driven spam, and may even require proof of product ownership before users can join and post in certain communities.
As it turns out, that didn’t work.
Digg shuts down again, pledges to return again
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