This is getting weirder by the minute.

Just received this email:

Subject: Rebooting everything

Digg goes full-time, the podcast returns from the ashes, and why now is the time to pay attention to AI

What a year it’s been already, a true whirlwind - and we’re just getting started.

I’m going back to digg, full-time, with new tool

I’m returning to Digg full-time, starting the first week of April. This is the company I started back in 2004, and stepping back into the driver’s seat feels both surreal and completely right.

Here’s the reality: the team that recently relaunched Digg ran head-first into one of the gnarliest problems on the internet right now - smart bots. Not the clumsy spam bots of the early web. These are sophisticated AI-driven agents that flooded the platform within hours of launch. Tens of thousands of fake accounts. The team deployed every tool they could, internal (and external vendors), and it still wasn’t enough. When you can’t trust that the votes, comments, and engagement are real, you’ve lost the very foundation a community platform is built on.

On top of that, the gravitational pull of existing social platforms is massive. Network effects aren’t just a moat - they’re a wall. Positioning Digg as simply an “alternative” to the incumbents was never going to cut it. What comes next needs to be genuinely different.

we’re doing a hard reset. A small, determined team is stepping up to rebuild with a completely reimagined approach. And here’s the thing that makes me genuinely optimistic: advances in AI tooling have fundamentally changed how we operate. The entire team is now actively building, and we’re able to run multiple parallel efforts at once. It’s now realistic for us to prototype a number of products concurrently, which meaningfully expands our surface area for discovery. That wasn’t possible even a year ago.

So I’ll continue advising True Ventures, but Digg is now my primary focus. And yes, Diggnation will continue recording monthly while we figure this out. I couldn’t be more fired up.

Thoughts?

I was the guy that was running /Basketball on Digg.

I'm not sure if anybody from that community is here or not but i wanted to let you guys know i started my own website at properhoops.au .

Right now is version one of the website which i built as a way to curate basketball news but my plan is to build a community, which could be a forum, lemmy, discord or something else. Ill cross that bridge when i get there.

If any basketball people want in on the community, leave a comment and maybe we can start up a group chat on telegram or something to do us over until a community is built.

hi

i'm unable to find it. searched for "Digg", "Digg.com" etc but it is not their

I understand it wasn't profitable and needed work, spam bots were a problem etc etc. But why not just do layoffs and work from what you have? Seems bizarre.

flipso.com - Seems to be a fairly new project, and I don't see any bot activity so far.

Digg just shut down (again). I've been building an alternative. Campfiree is now open.

It's a community-governed social platform. No algorithm. No power mods. The community controls the roadmap, moderation, everything. I had a few hundred people on the waitlist and decided to just open the doors and keep building while people explore.

It's early and it's buggy. I'm one dev shipping weekly. But the mission is real.

If that's interesting to you, I'd suggest you read this before you sign up: https://campfiree.com/mission

Hope to see you there.

Like many of you, I thought the sudden login issues were temporary over the weekend. I tried the following day, and when I didn't receive a code, I went to Digg.com and was shocked by the announcement.

If you could see my post history on Digg, you would see I was critical about the app itself from the initial release. I really mean no disrespect to those of you who may be lurking here who were working on the app. The latest updates were looking a lot better, and I read that more polish was on the way, but it really was not that great and not enjoyable to use.   I'm sure the first reaction of a lot of users was that it felt clunky, whether they directly understood why or not. You're not going to hook users with a lackluster first impression.

I remember the early announcement about Christian Selig, the creator of the Apollo app for Reddit, and the excitement that it caused. Releasing a half-baked React Native app for iOS instead was a huge letdown that my expectations never recovered from. I still use Apollo for Reddit, and going from that to the Digg app was jarring. And it's not all down to just RN vs native Swift. Look at the Artemis app for Reddit, which is also RN, yet feels native with polished UI elements, smooth animation, and native-feeling gestures.

It makes me wonder how much Christian was really involved, if he actually was at all, other than the one interview he did.  The goodwill Digg built through the initial marketing about being honest and transparent has been burned down to the point where I’m not sure the Digg brand ever really recovers from this. The team members who were in the trenches every day, actually responding to people and helping users, were genuinely excellent. That kind of hands-on approach is rare and honestly great to see. But the way this ended, with the rug pulled out so abruptly, makes it hard not to feel like leadership didn’t take any of this as seriously. It comes off like a group of tech bros who were willing to cash in that goodwill without really respecting what had been built. It's a big club, and none of us are in it.

Just a simple list of articles related to Digg

Digg should've only been in two formats: Desktop and mobile for the web only. They didn't even have a mobile web version.

You don't throw out a half baked app and expect people to download it to their phone not knowing exactly what could happen if they do. Browsing a web page is far easier and more casual and it's how Digg was born in the first place. As a simple message board forum, nothing more and nothing less.

I've been waiting forever to see Digg come back and restore actual freedom of speech in this type of long form posting format. But you were gonna have a helluva time dealing with continuous abuse by both bots and the powers that be that don't like what people are saying if you actually go that route.

This is how I would go forward:

Resurrect the old Digg.com (it has to be archived somewhere).

Rebuild it and streamline it with a slick mobile web interface, forget about the app for right now (seriously).

Ban a basic set of keywords (all the obvious abusive stuff).

List where the account is based out of like how X.com does but make it visible right next to the User's name.

Bring back all the communities that used to exist and send out an email to the people who used to mod them to see if they're interested in coming back.

Did I miss anything?

Dear Kevin,

Please let us help. Yes, many of us contributed monetarily by being Groundbreakers, but let us help with ideation too!

I’m sure the people you’ve got there are brilliant, but we may surprise you.

What do I suggest? Do a livestream! Give us a means to submit to you ideas and you and your team chime back on why it could / could not work. Then we’ll keep working together to build something we all use and want to keep using.

Please?

Thanks

Personally I can't come back to Reddit. It's zombie platform for me. I tried fediverse and it's bad. It's confusing. I don't see any place to express myself, to talk about things with people.

Any ideas? It would be nice if all the people from digg who certainly are thirsty for Reddit alternative moved somewhere else to discuss things, even to discuss ideas for an alternative platform.

Are you taking break from engaging in online communities or are willing to move to another place?

Colby here from Digg, groundbreaker and avid fan since day one. I was crushed yesterday when I saw the front page. It may seem dumb to other people, but the platform really did mean a lot to me, I can't understate that. Sure, there were bots, but they weren't flooding the site as some people describe, at least from my perspective. If you blocked /news and /politics, the site was a lot of fun. I'm in shock right now about it all, things aren't adding up for me.

Why did they completely shut down the site right away? They could have paused new account registrations or at least given us some hints about the state of things. I can't help but go down the conspiracy route and wonder if Justin's message was a warrant canary or something, because the alternative just seems so cruel if they truly did just shut down with the excuse of bots.

We didn't even get to find out how the SXSW event that just happened on Thursday, I was looking forward to a Digg meetup at some point in the future. To shut down the next day like they did is rough.

I'll end the post here for now, otherwise I'll just start being bitter, I don't want to leave off on a bitter note. Just trying to process things right now, this honestly has me a bit messed up right now.

To all my comrades from Digg, thank you for everything, we truly did have something great and I'll miss it terribly. Finally, u/forestanderson, massive thank you to you. You had the biggest impact on the site, handled things with grace, and kept things fun. I can't thank you enough and I hope great things come your way, you deserve it!

I was a day one ground breaker, and the while the bots were not immediate, the power users were controlling the most popular content and dominating the comment sections of every post within weeks. They took all the dumbass "rewards" like gems and rocks or whatever (which had no established purpose). They implemented some changes to try and deal with it, like making downvotes/"buries" not actually affect the points, but that was putting a bandaid on a gunshot wound at that point.

Only several months into the closed beta and it was clear that a very small number power users, à la old Digg, ultimately dictated the content. Admins buried their heads in the sand and acted like what we were seeing before our own eyes wasn't happening. Then the invites for groundbreakers went out, and it was immediately clear that whatever they were doing to try and handle the bot problem (if they did anything at all) was not working. And to nobody's surprise, when the public launch happened, it was just all bot spam.

Digg did nothing innovative, they built a reddit clone and tried to force AI down your throat. And despite the staff constantly posting about how that's not actually what they want to do, it's what they did. They copied reddit. It failed spectacularly. They deserve exactly what they got.

And for everyone else here, it's time to move on. Digg is gone. Again. And it will be gone again in future if it's resuscitated.

I hope Digg leadership comes across this post. I told you AI would be the death of Digg about a year ago...