Digg is laying off employees and shutting down the app while bringing back the company’s tools

Digg — Kevin Rose’s reboot of the once-popular link-sharing site — is laying off a significant portion of its staff, the company announced Friday. However, Digg CEO Justin Mizell said the startup has not closed its doors. Instead, Rose will return to work at Digg full-time while the company tries to find its footing.

Rose will continue to work as an advisor at investment firm True Ventures, but will make Digg his primary focus going forward.

The startup set out to offer an alternative to existing community forums, where people can post and share links, media, and text and engage in topical discussions. But while Digg has had smart ideas about how to improve content and verify that users are who they claim to be, the company admits it was overwhelmed by bots even in its early days.

Referring to the “dead Internet theory,” which claims that today’s web is more bots than humans, Mezzell describes the problem of combating spam in a post on Digg.

“When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers suggesting that Digg still had meaningful Google link authority,” the blog post about the layoffs said. “Within hours, we had a taste of what we had only heard rumors about. The Internet was now populated, in large part, by sophisticated artificial intelligence agents and automated calculations. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we did not appreciate the scale, complexity, or speed with which they found us.”

The company said it banned tens of thousands of accounts, deployed internal tools, and worked with external suppliers, but that was not enough. For a site that relies on user votes to rate content, the uncontrollable bot problem meant those votes couldn’t be trusted.

“This isn’t just a Digg problem. It’s an Internet problem,” Meisel points out.

Mezzell also said that going up against established competitors (likely referring to Reddit) was extremely difficult, describing the competition as not just a moat but a wall.

The company did not announce the number of people affected by the layoffs, but said a small team will continue to rebuild Digg as something “truly different.” The Digg app has been pulled from the App Store, and the layoff post is currently the only content on the Digg website. However, the Diggnation podcast — a video show hosted by Rose — will continue.

For context, Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian acquired what was left of the old Digg earlier last year, with the goal of creating a site where communities had more control and ownership for moderators and moderators. The deal was a leveraged acquisition involving True Ventures, Ohanian’s company Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian personally, and venture firm S32. Financing details have not been announced.

Digg was not immediately available for comment.