Building on the internet in 2026 is different. We learned that the hard way. Today we're sharing difficult news: we've made the decision to significantly downsize the Digg team. This wasn't a decision made lightly, and it's important to say clearly: this is one of the strongest groups of people we've ever had the privilege of working with. This is not a reflection of their talent, their effort, or their belief in what we were building. It's a reflection of the brutal reality of finding product-market fit in an environment that has fundamentally changed.
We faced an unprecedented bot problem
When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority. Within hours, we got a taste of what we'd only heard rumors about. The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn't appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they'd find us. We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was 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.
This isn't just a Digg problem. It's an internet problem. But it hit us harder because trust is the product.
Building social is hard, incumbents are harder
We underestimated the gravitational pull of existing platforms. Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall. The loyalty users have to the communities they've already built elsewhere is profound. Getting people to move is a hard enough problem. Getting them to move and bring their people with them is something else entirely.
What’s next
We're not giving up. Digg isn't going away.
A small but determined team is stepping up to rebuild with a completely reimagined angle of attack. 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.
We're also announcing something we're excited about: Kevin Rose, Digg's founder who started the company back in 2004, is returning to join the team full-time. Starting the first week of April, Kevin will be putting his focus back on the company he built twenty+ years ago. He'll continue as an advisor to True Ventures, but Digg will be his primary focus. We couldn't think of a better person to help figure out what Digg needs to become.
Lastly, Diggnation, our official Digg podcast, will continue recording monthly while we work on the re-reboot.
Lastly, and most importantly, thank you…
To the team members we're saying goodbye to today: thank you. You took a bet on a hard problem and showed up every day. The work you did laid the groundwork for what comes next, even if it doesn't feel that way right now.
To the community who came back to Digg, submitted links, argued in the comments, and emailed us with what you wanted: we haven't forgotten why we're doing this. We know how frustrating this is, and we hope you'll give us another look once we have something to show, we’ll save your usernames!
Ultimately, the internet needs a place where we can trust the content and the people behind it. We're going to figure out how to build it.
More soon
–@justin, CEO