This is the twentieth issue of Platformocracy. Whether you’ve been here since the beginning or just joined this week, I am grateful for your interest and your time. I hope that together, we can bring meaningful democratic change to our online lives.
I do have a favor to ask. Could you share this issue with someone you know who might find it interesting? I am hoping to grow Platformocracy to a larger reader base in the months to come. Thanks!
What Is Exit, Voice, and Loyalty?
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty is a model for how people let organizations know that they have started to deteriorate (worse products, poor governance, etc).
Exit is the option to leave – stop buying a company’s products or quit a group. The organization gets an indirect signal due to lost revenues or shrinking membership.
Voice is the option to ask for change directly with feedback, complaints, or protests. (Hopefully the organization is listening.)
Loyalty influences whether you choose to exit, use your voice, or suffer silently. It’s a matter of confidence – whether your complaints will be heard, and whether alternatives are worth the hassle of changing over.
Who came up with this model?
Albert Hirschman (1915-2012) was an influential economist who wrote Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States in 1970. His academic career spanned UC Berkeley, Yale, Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton. Before that, he was part of the anti-fascist resistance in Germany, fought in the Spanish Civil War, helped artists and intellectuals escape Nazi-occupied France, and served in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA). In other words, he was a complete badass.
Why is Exit good for Internet platforms?
In a competitive market, exit is bad news. Say you’re a rubber duck manufacturer and you switch to a low-cost squeaker supplier. If stores in Amsterdam, London, and Kyoto cut their orders because your ducks aren’t selling, it’s a sign that those cut-rate squeakers aren’t getting the job done, and you need to go back to the good stuff before it’s too late.
If you’re a large organization with weak competition, the incentives turn upside-down. The first people to exit are usually (per Hirschman) “more quality-conscious, alert, and potentially activist.” That’s usually a small minority, so their departure to small competitors isn’t much of a threat. Even better, once they’re gone, you’re left with a more passive customer base. You may even want to drive your most demanding customers away, “so as to be able to give up the strenuous and tiresome quest for excellence.”
The result is a “type of monopoly-tyranny… an oppression of the weak by the incompetent and an exploitation of the poor by the lazy which is the more durable and stifling as it is both unambitious and escapable.”
[If you haven’t noticed, Hirschman is dryly hilarious.]
In this light, Meta’s support of the Fediverse in Threads doesn’t look so altruistic. If the Fediverse thrives (within reason), it means Meta gets rid of all the people who care deeply about safety, participatory governance, and decentralization. It will be much easier for Meta to make money from Threads if its user base is limited to those who will put up with the usual creeping enshittification.
How could Loyalty help solve this problem?
If those demanding customers were loyal to the organization, they might stay around and use Voice to push for meaningful improvement. Hirshman lays out a few levers that Loyal members have:
Threat of exit. Organizations can ignore voice if they are confident nobody will actually exit. But if your most prominent and loyal members say they’ll leave if you don’t change, it gets the organization’s attention as a sign that things are bad enough to be on the verge of collapse.
Boycott. This is an effective move between voice and exit, because a group of people withdraw “for the specific and explicit purpose of achieving a change of policy on the part of the boycotted organization.” You are exiting temporarily, but promising to come back if your demands are met.
In social media, the most loyal and influential members are popular creators. Imagine if Mr. Beast threatened to leave YouTube over a harassment problem. Or imagine a boycott where a few hundred top TikTok creators banded together and refused to post new videos until the platform does more to protect teens.
What drives Loyalty?
Loyalty is a reflection of how difficult it is to exit. There are blunt methods to foster loyalty (think about the dangers of leaving organized crime), but Hirshman’s work proposes that loyalty can be healthy, too.
Traditional groups. If you identify deeply with a group, like your family or your country, exit feels unthinkable due to the high social and psychological cost of stepping away. Smaller Internet communities like Fediverse servers or Blacksky aren’t just entertainment — they are places where people can be themselves and feel safe. Members are vocal and engaged in a way that casual users of mass-market social media aren’t.
Public goods. Members of an organization may remain loyal even as it deteriorates dramatically, if they believe it stands for something bigger that is worth fighting for. They might be willing to exit in practice, but they can’t exit emotionally – they worry that “the organization to which they belong would go from bad to worse if they left.” This is how Googlers felt back when the company’s informal motto was “don’t be evil.”
How could tech platforms foster Loyalty, and why?
Voice helps organizations recognize and fix problems before they hit a point of terminal decay. As disruptive as a YouTube celebrity protest would be, I am sure Neal Mohan and crew would prefer that to waking up one day to discover their top creators have all signed exclusive deals with TikTok.
Big tech platforms would benefit from stopping the lazy-monopolist game of letting their most demanding customers leave, and doing more to foster loyalty. Long-time users have built their identities around platforms, and deserve loyalty and respect in return. Think protections against account termination, free support, and a meaningful voice in policy and product decisions.
Platforms would also earn more loyalty if they recommitted to being forces for good in the world. Meta changing their policies to suit the current political regime, or YouTube making a payoff and restoring banned accounts, might be good business, but you can’t expect users to be loyal to companies that don’t stand for anything but survival.
People seem to be catching on, and exit is starting to kick in. The Financial Times (gift article for the first three Platformocracy readers) recently reported that global social media usage peaked in 2022 and has been heading down in most age cohorts and regions worldwide. The lazy-monopolist approach works if most of your customers can’t be bothered to leave, but apathy and friction are the weakest forms of loyalty.
It’s not like Meta hasn’t been warned – they testified in May that their internal brand surveys rank them among the worst companies in the U.S. The Metaverse and their new AI lab are attempts to win back loyalty with shiny new products, but I expect that they will struggle as long as they fail to give their community a reason to believe, and confidence that their voices will be heard.
Ideas? Feedback? Criticism? I want to hear it, because I am sure that I am going to get a lot of things wrong along the way. I will share what I learn with the community as we go. Reach out any time at [email protected].
