Corporations really want you to believe that grassroots personal boycotts are ineffective and a waste of time, but the truth is much more complicated.

Enough people boycott PayPal to make a web developer choose another payment product. He writes about it on HN which amplifies the boycott’s message to tens of thousands of readers. Some of them will join the boycott. PayPal’s PR department is presumably unhappy about this reason now coming up in searches like “PayPal vs Stripe.” And it didn’t take any centralized organizing.