If you came of age in the Web 2.0 era, you probably remember hearing about if not posting to a website called Digg.
Digg was a cultural phenomenon in the early Obama years. It was frequently mentioned alongside Facebook and MySpace as a transformative technology that empowered users and fostered deep communication.
It was Reddit before Reddit. In fact, many of its contributors migrated to Reddit after a disastrous redesign of Digg in 2010. The new format made the site unfriendly to most but basically unusable to its power users who dominated the front page and manipulated the list of top stories. Digg quickly lost 90% of its traffic, which was mostly captured by Reddit. The demise of Digg is one of those funny stories that tech titans tell each other while discussing the dangers of enshittifying their sites too quickly.
After slipping past both human and automated detection, the site was eaten alive by swarms of fake users upvoting, commenting and engaging on each other’s posts.
Like Napster, AOL and Flickr, Digg never entirely went away. It still had a front page of barely curated content as the domain was passed back and forth between cut-rate companies with grandiose names. But last June, Digg announced it had been acquired by original founder Kevin Rose, who had plans to restore the site to its late ’00s glory. Aimed directly at its old nemesis Reddit (one of Rose’s partners is Alexis Ohanian, the jilted co-founder of Reddit), the new Digg would expiate its sins by crafting a site for users first and foremost, they claimed. The platform spent six months in active development with a group of beta users who paid $5 for a sneak peek and on-site perks.
The New Digg opened to the public on January 14, 2026.
It lasted 60 days.
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This time, Digg didn’t die because it stabbed its users in the back. Digg never had the chance. And it’s not clear how many actual users the new Digg even had. Immediately after launch, the site was inundated by a bot tsunami too big for moderators or developers to resist. After slipping past both human and automated detection, the site was eaten alive by swarms of fake users upvoting, commenting and engaging on each other’s posts.
“Building on the internet in 2026 is different,” read a note from Digg’s new CEO, posted after the site was shut down. “We learned that the hard way.”
Today, any site that is not explicitly anti-AI will be completely dominated by AI.
The site faced an “unprecedented” bot problem which began literally hours after opening on January 14. “We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn’t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they’d find us,” he wrote. The company deployed internal tooling and deployed “industry-standard external vendors” to try to separate real members and quash the flood of bots but none of it was enough.
“The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts,” he wrote, and some people were even surprised.
Dead Click Theory
That bots might outnumber human beings on the internet is not a new or particularly radical theory. The immolation of Digg, however, suggests bots may outnumber us by a much greater magnitude than anyone expected. Not too long ago, bots would attempt to infiltrate legitimate discussions to throw up an ad or manipulate conversation. Today there’s every reason to believe that bots are an essential part of any discussion — starting, contributing, even taking up both sides of any conversation.
One doesn’t need to create a social media site like Moltbook for AI-powered bots. Every site with user generated content is now a social media platform for AI-powered bots. All of them. Today, any site that is not explicitly anti-AI will be completely dominated by AI.
Once an esoteric, maybe even satirical belief, “Dead Internet Theory” is the claim that most of the activity on the internet is primarily a simulation created and coordinated by bots, and humans sometimes, by accident, stumble into it.
It’s a “theory” in the sense gravity is a “theory” now. The only argument against it is taking issue with the word “most.”
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That the internet is less a product of human interactions than a bot-infested hologram controlled by malign state actors and Israeli malware gangs has ramifications so big it’s hard to even hold them in your head. Things like democracy, public opinion, cultural trends and political scapegoating — they’re all up in the air because almost every institution and entity is built on the idea that the internet is some kind of a valid measurement of something.
If it ever was, it’s not now. And every day, as deployment of increasingly sophisticated bots becomes easier and more accessible, it will be less accurate than it was the day before. The scale of the problem in the past suggested that reality was being distorted by malign activity. We should probably start thinking in terms of the internet’s relationship with reality which has been completely destroyed.
Bots and the Box Office
And on a more practical level this effects musicians, and matters more for the music industry than any other creative field. Only in the recorded music industry has the box office been replaced by something called “plays.” Payment for the creative work of musicians and producers is tied to the exact type of online engagement which bots replicate so well. Flawlessly, in fact: it’s much easier to write a script that presses a button than a script that argues convincingly that we should turn our neighbors in to Homeland Security or nuke Iran.
Maybe it was always a bad idea to base the income for the entire creative engine of the music industry on what was bullshit at the time & has never been more bullshit than it is now.
Paying people based on plays and follower counts is madness in this situation. The industry might as well start distributing cash based on medieval prophecies and astrological charts. But that’s where we are, and the industry has developed or suggested no credible alternatives.
Internet metrics were always sort of bullshit, even when Digg was in its prime and a clique of users figured out how to game it. Maybe it was always a bad idea to base the income for the entire creative engine of the music industry on what was bullshit at the time. Maybe. But it has never been more bullshit than it is right now.
As for Digg, its CEO called its latest immolation a “hard reboot” and the site would return a few months later with excessively tight moderation. It’s not clear how they’ll go up in flames this time — or if there are any real people still out there willing to watch.
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[…] The Internet Is Over. They created a new version of beloved millennial site Digg. Bots destroyed it in just 60 […]