Did you know it was back? They are blaming bots.

I think the [dupe] is a false alarm in the sense that they just put up a banner saying it is shut down and I think they were starting it up again back then.

I am kind of peeved. I started a community there and diligently posted links to topical news, and it kind of became a reference to me. Like many others, I've put in some amount of effort.

Now it's gone, again. Without a head's up or a way to get a backup out of it, it seems like. Can't say I am a fan of that.

Related - others?

Digg.com Is Back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46671181 - Jan 2026 (10 comments)

Digg.com relaunch public beta is live - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46623390 - Jan 2026 (18 comments)

Digg.com (Relaunch) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46524806 - Jan 2026 (3 comments)

Digg.com is back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963430 - Aug 2025 (204 comments)

Digg is trying to come back from the dead with a reboot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43812384 - April 2025 (0 comments)

I liked digg v2 (I guess), when it relaunched as a sort of curator of interesting articles (and videos). For years it was my go-to place when bored and wanted something interesting to read.

I guess that in an ocean of upvote-based platforms, an island of hand-picked content was a welcome change -- at least for me.

The move (back) to a reddit-like site never made sense to me. Hopefully what comes next has real value to the users.

> This is not a reflection of their talent, their effort, or their belief in what we were building. It's a reflection of the brutal reality of finding product-market fit in an environment that has fundamentally changed.

Ironic, they use AI in their shutdown post that blames AI.

There strategy did not make any sense: only a few pre-approved broad-and-shallow forums about everything instead of trying to attract niche communities from Reddit or even FB Groups.

OH NO. Anyway...

Didn't Kevin Rose re-acquire Digg in the last year or so?

Whatever happened to MrBabyMan?

That was fast.

Much like the vouch system mitchellh is working on for open source contributors, the wider web needs a trust layer that can vouch for a poster's status as human or AI, along with a "quality" score that can travel from site to site.

Really annoying, I was starting to use it for a few niche communities instead of Reddit.

If they relaunch, I hope they develop something integrated with the fediverse. I believe the time to build walled gardens is over, plugging with the fediverse might give them a running start to build something g together with the wide fediverse community, maybe something easier to use for non-techies and well moderated.

We will see I guess…

Community /books helped me track down a book I've been dying to reread for almost ten years now. Reddit failed the task, so did all other places I turned to. Cheers for that, and rip.

Interesting there was no notice given to the people who paid $5 for pre-launch access and who helped build the communities before it went public. Not a good way to get anyone to invest their time in it next time they launch. "Bots" is a shitty excuse too. Their whole thing was that they were going to build it a utilise "AI" to prevent that and make moderation more automated. In reality they launched zero of those features and then opened it up to the world completely unprepared.

So as predicted it wasn't really worth eyeballs or the inevitable forced media coverage 6 months ago.

And I will continue to die on the will die on the hill that Reddit only survived/became "successful" because of the legendary Digg slip up and exodus. Alexis Ohanian still doesn't seem to have any clue that it was right-place-right-time and Kevin Rose seems to have not learned much either. Can we stop giving either anymore credibility? As with any social site it's the user base/community that helps pull thru darkness. And no one was really asking for this.

Let sleeping dogs lie.

> We're not giving up. Digg isn't going away.

I think the HN title needs adjusted

I would pay cash for access to a social site that bans all US politics, the astroturfing associated with it is simply unbearable.

The bot problem is serious right now. I've switched to only allowing accounts that have paid at least once to post for my own network. It's a hard barrier (minimum spend is $2 for my site), but it almost completely solves the bot problem.

We really need some way to "verify as human" in the next coming years.

Kinda seems like we’re rapidly headed for the complete collapse of the internet as we know it.

Every site that is driven by user posting seems to be headed towards being overrun by AI bots chatting with each other, either for sake of promoting something or farming karma.

And there’s really not much point in publishing good content anymore, since AI is just going slurp it up and regurgitate it without driving you any traffic.

Though it’ll be interesting to see what happens to ChatGPT and the like once the amount of quality content for them to consume slows to a trickle. Will people still use ChatGPT to get product recommendations without Reddit posts and Wirecutter providing good content for those recommendations?

They literally just went public in Jan. Building it back up was going to take years

I don’t understand what kind of shenanigans transpired. But it seems there’s more to in than “bots”

If it truly is bots, maybe a private invite only social network is the way to go.

Is Kevin Rose known to know how to address bot problems? I think it's a little absurd to address a bot problem with bringing back the original founder. I believe he was great at community building and functionality, but bot prevention is a different beast. The post mentioned that they also worked with third parties which I believe should have more bot prevention experience than Kevin.

To be fair, I don't know Kevin Rose personally, so maybe he knows more than the industry, but I highly doubt it.

Reddit has the same problem. They are fighting it more or less successfully. I would look more in that direction.

The "new" Digg was just Reddit with the exact same type of comments you can find there and I left it (Digg and Reddit) because of that. There are very few sites where real discourse is still possible without it being filled with memes, running jokes, "witty" one-liners and the constant need to "one-up" and call-out each other. What does Digg even want to be? Nobody needs a second nu-Reddit. It speaks volumes that this post also seems to be AI-generated.

Digg may have a bot problem but Reddit isn't far behind. So many subreddits are full of slop that they've become useless and/ or completely unreliable.

What's an actual viable solution to this kind of thing?

CATPCHAs aren't it. Maybe micro-fees to actually post things would discourage bot posting? I really don't know.

Seems like it's just dead internet all over the place these days.

Is that the whole story? Why isn't reddit overrun by bots then (or are they?), and why wouldn't basic proof-of-work techniques fence against bots? Since they started out just in January, isn't it plausible to assume they didn't meet their target user figures and investors jumped ship?