They need to see if they're being attacked my a vocal minority or a true majority. If it's the latter, a revert should happen. If the former, they should consider standing their ground.
See every major change Facebook has ever done. When people exploded about the privacy implications of having a news feed (Oh no!), should Facebook have punted?
The changes to Digg are very questionably for the benefit of the end-user. I'm not sure what Kevin and Digg hoped to achieve by having publishers directly spamming the Digg front page with content. It's a very rudimentary, very poor, RSS reader, and the anti-thesis of what Digg was about, user-selected stories from all over the web. I can only think Digg are getting an affiliate kickback from the larger publishers.
I'm not a disgruntled Digg user; I abandoned it for Reddit about 3 months ago, and I haven't looked back. It seems to me the small Reddit team know their users pretty well (see the way they handled Prop 14 without the need for a user revolt). I honestly wonder exactly who Digg think they are serving with v4.
I fully expect to see a similar scenario play out on Reddit at some point.
By essentially allowing their sponsors to decide what's going to be on their front page, they've changed digg from a crowdsourced editorial board to a sponsored RSS feed. I can't remember the last time a .com made such a shortsighted decision....I can't see digg even being around in a few years after this.
Digg went from all about being user submitted content to an RSS reader where a lot of posts are auto submitted by blogs and ends up on the front page.