{"id":474409,"date":"2026-03-14T01:37:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-14T01:37:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/474409\/"},"modified":"2026-03-14T01:37:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-14T01:37:09","slug":"diggs-open-beta-shuts-down-after-just-two-months-blaming-ai-bot-spam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/474409\/","title":{"rendered":"Digg\u2019s open beta shuts down after just two months, blaming AI bot spam"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s only been a year since Digg founder Kevin Rose, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, and a few others announced the link-sharing site would relaunch, promising a \u201csocial discovery built by communities, not by algorithms.\u201d Now, two months after opening<\/a> its Reddit-like platform<\/a> to the public, Digg is announcing a \u201chard reset\u201d that\u2019s shutting down operations and will \u201csignificantly downsize the Digg team.\u201d<\/p>\n

When they announced its relaunch, Rose told The Verge <\/a>that AI could \u201cremove the janitorial work of moderators and community managers.\u201d Now, the new Digg\u2019s CEO Justin Mezzell writes in a note pinned to the homepage<\/a> that, \u201cWe knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn\u2019t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they\u2019d find us. We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite that, Mezzell paints the shutdown as temporary, saying, \u201cWe\u2019re not giving up. Digg isn\u2019t going away,\u201d with \u201cA small but determined team is stepping up to rebuild with a completely reimagined angle of attack.\u201d The blog post also announces that Kevin Rose is returning as a full-time employee in April, and the Diggnation<\/a> podcast will continue recording as they work toward relaunching, again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s only been a year since Digg founder Kevin Rose, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, and a few others…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":474410,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,5343,96,59,5344,50,621,224,227,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-474409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-culture","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-internet-culture","tag-news","tag-reddit","tag-social-media","tag-tech","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=474409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474409\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/474410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=474409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=474409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=474409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}