Digg, which just relaunched in January, lays off staff and shuts down, but promises it’s going to ‘rebuild with a completely reimagined angle of attack’

Remember Digg? You might if you’re of a particular online vintage. Launched in 2004, it was basically Hot or Not but for websites: Users would submit links to websites, and others would vote them up or down as they saw fit. It was a good way to find cool content stuff, and for a brief period it was all the rage. Most websites back then, including PC Gamer during its WordPress era, had a “submit to Digg” button to increase the likelihood of being noticed and loved.

The wheels came off, as they always do, thanks primarily to growing competition—mainly from Reddit, which went live a year after Digg—and an inability to change with the times. In 2012 Digg was sold to a company called Betaworks, and after a brief period of introspection was relaunched as “a startup,” and then more or less disappeared: It continued to function but we no longer submitted anything to Digg and basically stopped thinking about entirely a dozen years ago.

Frankly, I’d assumed Digg was dead, or at least I would have assumed that, if I’d ever been prompted to consider the matter. But it apparently was still alive and kicking, and in 2025 original Digg founder Kevin Rose and—somewhat ironically—Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian purchased the site and relaunched it, promising content moderation via some unknowable mix of humans and AI tools. After several months of pay-to-play early access, Digg relaunched into open beta in January—and two months later, it’s gone again.

“Building on the internet in 2026 is different. We learned that the hard way,” CEO Justin Mezzell admitted in a message now parked on the Digg website. “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.”

The problem, essentially, is that the Dead Internet Theory is now real. “The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts,” Mezzell wrote, and the Digg team was aware of that but “didn’t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they’d find us.” Despite valiant efforts across the board, they just couldn’t keep up with the torrent of machine garbo.

NuDigg also discovered what Amazon learned when it decided to throw hands with Steam: “We underestimated the gravitational pull of existing platforms,” Mezzell continued. “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.”

Despite all of this, Mezzell said “a small but determined team is stepping up to rebuild with a completely reimagined angle of attack,” which will be “genuinely different,” although from what, or in what ways, is not made clear. Mezzell also announced that Rose, Digg’s founder, is returning to the platform full time in April.

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