Very interesting point, and comparison to social media. It seems to me that if most of the users of Facebook, Reddit, etc, were to band together and leave to s

Very interesting point, and comparison to social media. It seems to me that if most of the users of Facebook, Reddit, etc, were to band together and leave to somewhere they get a better deal - then the value of those sites would effectively become zero. If they could just wield it well, they have massive bargaining power in those relationships. But the cost of organizing such groups, building a new suitably-featured site, and moving there is a large limiting factor. The same relationship could be extended to most networks - including city/housing networks. But staging this mutiny on social media sounds tough enough - in real life real estate, I imagine it's nearly impossible! As such, landowners get a hefty upper hand, and there's not much power the tenants can wield in that negotiation - even if they do collectively provide most of the real estate value of a property. That said... what if this bias in network effects isn't eternal, and we humans just haven't been very good at group organization so far? I can imagine a userbase mad enough at Facebook might pick a date a year from now, get everyone they possibly can to sign up to leave on that day, and mass-migrate to an equivalent site with similar features (which doesn't farm $250 a year off each person in data - or at least gives those funds back to the user). With smart contracts to ensure commitment to the move, it could even be a fully-funded and well-organized migration - which might even have negotiation options to abort if Facebook met their demands. People would probably even do it just for the spectacle/coolness factor of being part of such a big rebellion. It's a bit of a pipe dream, sure, but it's conceivable something like this could happen. And let's face it, other than the data/hosting challenges, most of these big social media sites aren't doing anything that difficult to replicate. Hell, I'd go so far as to say almost any company worth the big bucks is mainly being priced on brand and network effects (minus IP/asset ownership). If the networks underlying this got better at organizing and moving/threatening-to-move to alternatives, they could eat that value and pass it down to consumers. Hell, it might even work out that they could be paid to use these services. The city/housing space is one I'd imagine would be wayyy slower to benefit from any of these potential consumer unions technologies due to physicality constraints, but I imagine it too could be translated into these mutinys. e.g. People could agree to leave a city en-masse to a new one with better (pre-negotiated) rent/ownership prices, leaving the old city high and dry in a bubble-bursting scenario. Of course we don't see this now - or at least, not in any organized form, just an economic drying-up when e.g. a factory closes and tenants can't afford their rent. But perhaps it's possible in the future as mobility, communication and coordination increase? Who knows.