“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.
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 for it to die off in a year or two.
Yup. Banning a bot account just means another bot will take its place. Shadow ban the bots, count them as actual users, profit.