How can digital platforms sustain and evolve their legitimacy in the eyes of users when they modify exchange rules and algorithms that form the foundation of their activities and relationships with users? This study investigates a peer-to-peer exchange platform which implemented a virtual currency for scaling and the practices it performed to maintain legitimacy throughout this change process. The empirical analysis shows how the change contradicted existing legitimacy standards, aroused controversy among old users, and attracted new users unfamiliar with existing norms, and led to diverging user evaluations and behaviours which threatened the platform’s legitimacy. In response, the platform performed three practices to (re)configure the meanings and system designs which govern the relationships with and between users: experimenting with rhetoric and system designs, representing community experiences and norms, and silencing uncompromising user evaluations. We propose the concept of material-rhetorical practices to capture platform doings that enhance a perceived alignment between their evolved digital systems and community legitimacy standards. We explain how configuring and evolving rhetoric and digital materiality constitute a platform’s legitimation process when undergoing change and are consequential to how it governs relationships.
