Technology

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.

Reddit and Twitter are filled to the brim with spambots and remain successful. The lack of distinction between real and fake content serves to attract marketers and propagandists to such platforms, with most users remaining due to the network effect. With its venture capitalist funding, Digg would be just as willing to benefit from spam if it held market dominance, and thus only distributed Fediverse platforms like Lemmy or Mastodon are viable solutions.

TL;DR:

AI bots and AI agents destroyed it.

Sincerely a real problem and I as a sysadmin for various www sites: I loathe them daily.

If Cisco, F5 etc could invent a way to block these bots at the firewall and load balancer level, they'd make billions.

Lol who could've seen it coming? From an article almost exactly 2 months ago on the launch:

"They’re betting that AI can help to address some of the messiness and toxicity of today’s social media landscape. At the same time, social platforms will need a new set of tools to ensure they’re not taken over by AI bots posing as people."

https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/14/digg-launches-its-new-reddit-rival-to-the-public/

Heyyyyy at least they failed fast :)

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.

It's a social media problem. It's going to be hard to provide pseudonymity, low-cost accounts relatively freely, and counter bots spamming the system to manipulate it. The model worked well in an era before there were very human-like bots that were easy to produce.

It might be possible to build webs of trust with pseudonyms. You can make a new pseudonym, but the influence and visibility gets tied to, for example, what users or curators that you trust trust, so the pseudonym has less weight until it acquires reputation. I do not think that a single global trust "score" will work, because you can always have bot webs of trust.

Unfortunately, the tools to unmask pseudonyms are also getting better, and throwing away pseudonyms occasionally or using more of them is one of the reasonable counters to unmasking, and that doesn't play well with relying more on reputation.

It was so shit anyway

The amount of racism and bigotry that was tolerated was fucking wild

It seemed like every disgusting person there wanted to turn it into some right-wing safe haven

The bitching about reddit being "leftist" was hilarious

Reddit is definitely not leftist at all, but they're so far right (and determined to be victims) that they have no clue what they are talking about

I guess using AI to moderate AI and bots wasn't working out.

Maybe they'll pivot to being a site similar to Moltbook, just bots moderating other bots that are conversing with each other. Sounds like they were almost there.

Sad to see, but I never really used it. I don't even know how they can combat this. The amount of bots/AI accounts everywhere is unprecedented.

That was fast.

Shameful. Not even a few weeks notice

I've never used the site but I can respect the letter of notice.

Damn I was wondering why my login code for the app wasn’t appearing in my inbox. Besides some of the AI stuff which was easy to ignore, I really liked the new Digg and had worked it into my daily routine.