Not at all surprising. My personal relationship with Digg was entirely destroyed by the redesign. It basically went like this: "Huh. My RSS feeds don't work a

Not at all surprising. My personal relationship with Digg was entirely destroyed by the redesign. It basically went like this: "Huh. My RSS feeds don't work anymore... Oh. Digg's redesign is out. Hmm... looks like I have to do a bunch of chores before Digg becomes useful to me again." -click- And I haven't been back. You have to be on drugs to think you can pull the rug out from under your users that way and actually keep them. Evolving product is hard. Yes, sometimes you're going to have to cut features, re-imagine functionality or reconfigure the user experience. This creates a little grumpiness at first. If you stay true to the original mission of your product, users will deal with it because it's in the furtherance of getting to something great, and they care about that. But: You've only got so much elasticity to work with in terms of your users being good sports in these transitions. You can't make a name for yourself selling turkey sandwiches and then "upgrade" to exclusively serving roast pork. There may be a union between the turkey people and the pork guys but a decent chunk are going to drop you and find the next-best turkey sandwich cart.