As a developer, my loyalty to the Web as a whole rests upon the legitimacy of the institutions that govern it: there are ways to voice my concerns effectively, and there are ways to “agree to disagree” by exiting a debate and building my own Web site with my own policies in place.

My reasons are hardly original: that insight is due to “Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States,” an influential treatise by the arguably Nobel-worthy economist Albert Hirschmann. In it, he explained how consumers ‘teach’ producers what to sell and how, by choosing to complain or switch. Competition — the existence of a viable exit — can actually amplify the impact of “voice” and increase loyalty. Or, as Tyler Cowen put it: “HBO is more responsive than was East Germany.”

According to this model, my friends who chose to cope with their dissatisfaction by deciding to exit by opting-out were also implicitly deciding that Facebook’s official channels for voice were insufficient, such as the conversation on site governance or voting on the new Terms of Service (and, with a turnout of only 0.32%, they might even be right).

There are barriers to exit, he notes. The first is that Facebook doesn’t make it easy to download the data you have submitted to the site over time. To that end, Khare and others created an online app that downloads your updates, but so far not your pictures.

Hirschmann sees competition as an opportunity for exit, but in the case of a social network, where the data you have given it and the connections you have made constitute much of the value of the service, competition from other services is not especially viable. An irony is that, as Facebook becomes more open to the web, various other developers might find ways to compete by porting this data to less controversial pastures.