holy_calamity writes: A researcher at UCSD suggests that Digg is still feeling the consequences of annoying its top users back in September 2006. At the time, Kevin Rose responded to accusations that relatively small numbers of users had control of Digg's frontpage by tweaking his algorithm to penalise people that often digg the same stories. Top ranked users got angry and even quit Digg. In a paper in the pre-print Arxiv, the researcher used data scraped from digg to show "a general decline in individual user participation on Digg" that persists today. After the recent Facebook u-turns, proof that annoying your users can have long-lasting effects.