Modern tech support is woefully broken in many ways, and the speed to which consumers resort to complaining on Twitter is a partial symptom of that broken syste

Modern tech support is woefully broken in many ways, and the speed to which consumers resort to complaining on Twitter is a partial symptom of that broken system -- it's the result of consumers feeling like mass, reactionary public shaming is the only strategy that works anymore. That's not what I'm getting at though; I'm not saying everything is awesome, or that public backlash is even the best way to currently enact change -- I just want to push against the occasional criticism I see that complaining about stuff doesn't help, that consumer backlash is ultimately just virtue signalling, that boycotts don't ever work, and that it's all just a waste of time. To be clear, some types of complaining are harmful, problematic, or worthless: this is complicated, it isn't black-and-white. But it's not universally worthless to publicly push back on company policies. There are a nontrivial number of stories about consumer backlashes actually causing companies to change course. What that suggests is that on more important issues (just for one example, arbitration), we could see real movement if the backlash was large enough and unified enough.