Leaving a bad restaurant is easy.
Leaving a social network is a group project.
That difference helps explain why public campaigns to abandon large platforms can generate enormous discussion and surprisingly little movement.
Quit Facebook Day tried it in 2010.
Thousands agreed. Hundreds of millions stayed.
Two Canadian campaigners designated May 31, 2010 as Quit Facebook Day amid growing criticism of Facebook’s privacy changes. The campaign received substantial press attention and asked users to delete their accounts together rather than grumble separately.
The result was tiny compared with the network.
Dark Reading reported 34,388 pledges after the event against an estimated Facebook population of more than 540 million users. Contemporary Guardian coverage documented the privacy backlash and the organizing effort.
See Dark Reading’s post-event report and The Guardian’s contemporary coverage.
It would be easy to interpret that result as 540 million votes of confidence in Facebook.
It was not.
Everyone has to choose where Tuesday happens
A social network becomes useful partly because other people are there.
If ten friends dislike a platform, each one can still have a reason to stay because the other nine remain. A family group may not want to move until the whole family agrees. A club may need one destination that works for its least technical member. A business cannot abandon the place where customers still send messages just because the owner hates the interface.
Even an organized exit has to answer several questions at once:
Where are we going?
Will our contacts go there too? Can we move photos, messages, groups, and identities? Which day do we switch? What happens to people who refuse?
A campaign can therefore fail even when its complaint is widely shared.
Staying is not the same as choosing
Network effects create a coordination problem.
The individual decision that makes sense depends on what everyone else does. If most people remain, leaving can reduce the value of the service for the person who leaves while doing almost nothing to the platform.
That gives an established network an unusual kind of resilience.
People can complain, distrust a policy, install alternatives, and still keep the old account because the social graph has not moved with them.
This is why raw user counts need interpretation.
A person who stayed may be satisfied.
Or the person may simply have failed to convince 47 relatives, three clients, a school group, and the guy organizing Saturday’s barbecue to leave at the same time.