“If you know how to game Digg, you can get [a story] discovered,” said Steve Jurvetson, a partner at the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson in Menlo Park, California. “You can trigger legitimate tipping points.”

Also, each new change to Digg’s algorithm unleashes a site revolt from its loyal band of users, concerned that their pull—and the power of their voting bloc—will be thwarted.

Much of that anger gets directed at Rose, who spends quite a bit of his time in the public eye. He co-hosts a Web talk show, Diggnation, with former Tech TV host Alex Albrecht. Irreverent, with a consistently juvenile take, Diggnation is supremely popular among a certain segment of 20- to 35-year-old men. The site considers those consumers—a demographic that is highly sought after by advertisers who have had a hard time reaching it through TV and other media—to be its core.

“Young men have disappeared from all over media,” said Marissa Gluck of Radar Research, an internet consulting firm in Los Angeles. “One way to get them is through community.”

Still, this group is known for easily jumping ship for the next new thing. Its members can quickly and easily migrate if they believe they're being disenfranchised from what they consider their Digg-given rights.

“This audience has proven to be very fickle,” said Gluck. “Look at Napster, Grokster, LimeWire, Friendster, and Facebook.”

Plus there are plenty of places now to land. Digg copycats like Reddit (owned by Condé Nast, publisher of Portfolio.com), Yahoo’s Buzz, and Propeller are launching rapidly. Mixx, another upstart competitor, landed $2 million in funding in February.

Even more troublesome is Digg’s professed lack of profitability — very confusing for a site that claims 25 million unique visitors a month, 12,000 items posted daily, and one billion impressions of its widget spread across the Web.

Then there’s the fact that Digg been reported to be on the verge of a sale for the past 17 months, with any number of big-media suitors rumored to be kicking the tires at valuations ranging from $150 million to $300 million.

Digg declined to comment on whether it is actively seeking a suitor. But with competitors popping up right and left, it’s unclear how long that strategy—perhaps meant to entice higher offers—will last.

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Digg’s Maser said he is unconcerned about the site’s ability to thrive on its own. He said he believes that the core base might react to changes but that’s their nature.

“Change gets them concerned about change itself,” he says. “But there’s a very small group that has this perception.”

And if some of its most vocal critics do give up on Digg, the people running the site appear to believe that a more mainstream, less ideological user will replace them.

That, in turn, could lead to more advertising, and perhaps even a sale.

“We’d like to broaden the base’s sphere of interest,” says Maser. “The home page has served us well, until now.”