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“When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority,” the blog post about the layoffs states. “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.”

The company said it banned tens of thousands of accounts, deployed internal tooling, and worked with external vendors, but it wasn’t enough. For a site that relied on user votes to rank content, an uncontrollable bot problem meant those votes couldn’t be trusted.

They launched without any community mod tools beyond “delete post” for their entire run. The site predictably got overrun as site admins had to bear all the weight.

Funny stuff. But Kevin Rose is a scammer, his last project was NFT pump and dump.

It got a lot of white supremacists very quickly, and nothing was done to rein them in

How did Digg not already have an app?

They did.

We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn’t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they’d find us.”

The company said it banned tens of thousands of accounts

Rookie mistake. The professional move is to officially recognize all those bot accounts actual users and value your company at its height for user engagement. Then either IPO with a quick cash out, or sell to Private Equity and walk away from the zombie company you’ve just created.

Yep, deleted account shortly after they started showing up

That’s the canary in the coalmine

The company said it banned tens of thousands of accounts, deployed internal tooling, and worked with external vendors, but it wasn’t enough.

They did all that and it still didn’t work out? It is a headscratcher.

The loser who boasted about raising hundreds of thousands of dollars that he donated to Brett Kavanaugh disgusted me

If I raised that sort of money, my local animal shelter would get every cent

You’re a good dude id give you a high five but you know, maybe a bump is more appropriate

I specialise in the inappropriate

Easy way to screen out the bots - just require ID verification /s

Meanwhile, reddit be like:

https://media1.tenor.com/m/gaEpIfzxzPEAAAAd/pedro-monkey-puppet.gif

reddit barely could keep up witht he bots, although they developed more sophisticated means to block the lowest hang fruits.

Yup. Banning a bot account just means another bot will take its place. Shadow ban the bots, count them as actual users, profit.