We Made a "Social Media Rage List" | QDaily Research Lab

Yes — not what's popular, but what's infuriating.

These days people treat WeChat and Weibo about like this: I can't stand you, and I can't stop using you every day.

Kantar's 2016 China Social Media Impact Report, released early this year, found that the number of Chinese people using social media and how often they use it are both still rising, while satisfaction with social media keeps falling. Every year the report calculates a "China social media impact satisfaction score": 73.4 in 2014, 68.0 in 2015, and 67.0 this year.

QDaily Research Lab's survey "Why can't you quit social media?" drew 4,765 responses. More people picked "no reason, just killing spare time" (20.9%) than said they relied on it to keep up with friends' lives (16.7%) or to find out what was happening in the world (15%).

The main reason people can't drop social media is simply "I've got nothing better to do." The reasons they can't bring themselves to like it are clearly much stronger —

Online abuse is vicious. British researchers examined 100,000 tweets containing the word "rape" between Christmas 2013 and February 9, 2014 and found one in ten was a threat against a specific woman. At least a quarter of women online have been targets of online abuse, and people's indifference to it is scarier still. As the Black Mirror episode "Hated in the Nation" shows, people who tell someone online to die don't think they bear any responsibility for it, because it was "just talk."

Plenty of other things fall short of online abuse but have still, to one degree or another, left you disappointed in social media:

Friends who once lived calm and unbothered lives turn into photo-spamming maniacs the moment they open WeChat Moments;

Grown men more than a decade into adulthood revert overnight into "babies" who get "scared to death" by the slightest thing;

Elders who deserve respect keep forwarding rumors that have been debunked ten thousand times over;

……

The world is no longer gentle.

To work out exactly where things go wrong, QDaily Research Lab ran a series of polls and call-outs on the most annoying elements of social media. Based on the results, we've put together an incomplete "social media rage list" for you:

Meaningless, Manic Buzzwords

Prehistoric powers, the melon-eating crowd, a small goal, "the boat of friendship capsizes whenever it wants," the Ge You slouch, "tricks" and "blue skinny mushroom" — these seven phrases that ruled social media in 2016 all made the annual buzzword lists from The Commercial Press and the magazine Yaowen Jiaozi. And it turns out the more popular they got, the more annoying they became.

In a call-out that drew 6,937 people, "What made you roll your eyes this year?", "blue skinny mushroom" came first with nearly a fifth of the votes. In another poll where 21,524 reader responses chose "the buzzword you hated most this year", "blue skinny mushroom" took 5,095 votes for its all-around excellence at being boring, dull and meaningless; "prehistoric powers," "damn, you're impressive, bro," "a small goal" and "the boat of friendship capsizes whenever it wants" each drew more than 2,000 nominations.

Our Lab has now polled the most detested, inescapable brainwashing buzzwords three years running: the year before last the winner was "I'm speechless", and last year it was "scared the baby to death". People are still nominating "baby" this year, which shows social media has held steady — improved slightly, even — at its usual poverty of language and imagination. And any "baby" not yet scared to death stands a good chance of being beaten to death by accident by an angry crowd.

The mania comes partly from friends who can't express a feeling without a fashionable phrase in it, and partly from headlines and marketing accounts that jam in whatever's trending to catch eyeballs. The first group will one day know the cringe we feel now rereading our old QQ Zone updates. The second will just chase wave after wave of new buzzwords and make more informational garbage.

Comments That Blow Up Anywhere

A report on online comments from the data outlet FiveThirtyEight found that one in five people who comment online do it to nitpick. Most people comment to correct a mistake and set the record straight, but some always blow up over a misreading — or a deliberate misreading — which is why the internet's comment sections stay in bad shape year after year —

A news story mentions where someone is from, and the comments below are uniformly "people from X are all like that"; the ban on Korean entertainment comes up and it's "there's no entertainment in the face of the nation, the Koreans had it coming"; a victim in the news gets "flies don't land on a flawless egg" …… Even the most level-headed, even-tempered friends get worked up by comments that can't tell right from wrong.

A QDaily Research Lab survey, "Who do you most hate running into in the comments?", drew 8,556 responses. The "mindless flaming" people listed most often: "if you're so good, you do it," "you should be grateful," and regional slurs. The situations they hated most: "half-understanding something and mouthing off anyway," "everyone else is drunk, I alone am sober — angry youth plus male chauvinism," and "you make an argument, they answer with feelings."

People feel helpless against comments like these. In a poll that drew 12,476 responses, 25.4% said the moment that made them most regret not studying harder was "seeing an opinion I disagreed with and having no way to argue back." That is at best a consolation, because we all know that airtight logic and good evidence are no match for someone who resorts to personal attacks and plain unreasonableness.

Too many comments blowing up everywhere ruin other users' mood and drain the value of comment sections as a place to share opinions. So over the past three years more than ten foreign news sites, large and small, have decided to close their comment sections — among them Reuters, Bloomberg, Popular Science, and the American business site Business Insider, which announced its decision just last month.

On a platform like Weibo, built on comment interaction in the first place, the only way to cope is "la la la, I can't hear you," and the environment as a whole won't improve at all. Depressing.

Self-Infatuated Posts

Social media is a high-powered telescope. It takes the doting parent, the food obsessive, the person who falls apart if a day passes without posting a picture of their partner — all of them distant strangers — and magnifies them a thousand times in front of you. The scariest personality of all is self-infatuation.

Take the friends who post marriage-seeking ads on Douban. A lot of the time they aren't looking for a partner; they're writing themselves a love letter. The whole post is devoted to one feeling: "I love myself so much I can't breathe, and at this point I don't even expect to find a soulmate who deserves me," or "I'm easy to please — all I ask is someone who can write three thousand words on this eighteenth-century oil painting, so why has nobody turned up?" Douban has developed a custom of reposting every such ad on sight: "Ha, come look, another egomaniac has posted a marriage ad."

In a QDaily Research Lab poll, "Which 'talking to yourself' lines have you seen this year?", the top social media quotes were: "There's no ordinary pretty girl I can't sleep with, unless I simply don't want to"; "Month x, please be good to me (1≤x≤12)"; and "Don't like this post, have some shame." Ordinary pretty girls, Month x and Shame have issued a joint statement: give it a rest.

In Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development, egocentrism is a stage every child passes through. Between the ages of 2 and 7, young children fix their attention on their own actions and views, struggle to see things from anyone else's position, and can't separate the subjective from the objective. As children grow, they all leave "egocentrism" behind and mature. On that basis it is fair to conclude that people who like to post "Month x, please be good to me" on social media have a mental age still stuck at seven — genuine, certified "babies."

The Internet's Hundred Schools of Faking Expertise

Legal knowledge comes mainly from Queen Amami's prison speech; business knowledge from the WeChat sellers' "hard facts" that even Daddy Jack Ma praises; historical knowledge from Empresses in the Palace, Legend of Mi Yue and The Empress of China …… These days you can join the hundred schools of thought with no formal training at all.

Folk experts each display their own gift and point you out of life's confusion. You have probably met the Moments medical expert who mass-forwards "health secrets" with no sense of responsibility, the Weibo Warren Buffetts who are excellent at calling the stock market wrong, and the association of adolescent-pain-literature writers behind every song with 999+ comments. Each is a distinctive kind of expert, and each makes you want to hit someone.

The Dunning-Kruger effect holds that ignorance often doesn't leave people alarmed, troubled or more careful; instead it can make people who think they know a little blindly confident. An ignorant head is never empty. It is packed with prejudices, inspirational chicken soup and so-called "hard facts" that are really shit — and these routinely appear online as top-voted answers and "deep, quality" articles. Tell me that doesn't make you angry.

Reasoning Reduced to Cliché

On social media people express emotion in buzzwords and make arguments in clichés. Laws get misused, common sense gets repeated, and the result is an enormous glut of redundant information.

The most common is Murphy's Law. QDaily Research Lab once ran a poll, "Which laws have you seen misused?"; of 7,714 responses, 21% picked Murphy's Law. Delicate modern people can explain away anything that goes wrong with it — "I goofed off all semester and of course I failed the final; it's all Murphy's fault." Poor Murphy.

Then there is the "butterfly effect," an all-purpose law that can account for rising oil prices, a falling exchange rate, even NBA standings; the habit of calling one's own flaws "the short stave of the barrel," though somehow no stave is ever the long one; and the use of "herd behavior" and "the mindless crowd" to explain every trend and public event, when what the speaker usually means is only "I'm not one of those brainless people."

Trending Topics With Ancient Cores

Some topics come around every few days to remind your timeline they exist — social media's monthly repeats. Flee Beijing-Shanghai-Guangzhou, then fight your way back to Beijing-Shanghai-Guangzhou, because Beijing-Shanghai-Guangzhou doesn't believe in tears. If you didn't get into a 985-tier university half your life is already lost, and once you get into one you find you have nothing, because a 985 doesn't believe in tears either. Interns only ever get sent out for takeout and never grow, the truth about an internship is fetching takeout, and the workplace doesn't believe in tears ……

Each arrives with an enormous fanfare, and at bottom each is a personal choice no discussion will ever settle. The one thing we know for sure: tears have it worse than an online scam — nobody ever believes them.

Modifiers Hit by Inflation

When something genuinely impressive appears, quick-witted users coin a word for it, and social media spreads that word until everyone has it. But vocabulary upgrades faster than sincere, high-grade products get made, so the words devalue fast, lose their original meaning and become props that unworthy things use to gild themselves.

So the internet is full of "industry conscience" products that barely scrape a pass, "phenomenal hits" that got a handful of views, "visual feasts" you don't want to eat and might throw up, and "black tech" with next to no technology in it that is really using technology to rip you off — about as truthful a label as Taobao's "guaranteed authentic."

Titles people put over their own heads are inflating too. QDaily Research Lab once ran a survey, "What low-value titles have you seen on social media?", with 4,570 people responding. The top answers: "Weibo-contracted content creator," "wildly popular author" and "four-thousand-year-old beauty."

The bar for "Weibo-contracted content creator" is very low, and the title usually comes with a prefix like "internet analyst" or "Sina's famous parenting-and-food blogger." The first devotes itself to reposting venture firms' research reports or tech media's industry studies, with "a deep, quality read" in the repost line; the second only has to paste in the ad copy, put a #Magical New Zealand Honey# tag at the end of the Weibo post and attach a Tmall link.

As for the "wildly popular authors" with no popularity and plenty of power to annoy, the "four-thousand-year-old beauties" who seem to have cultivated themselves into immortals, and the "No. 1 xxx on the server" you see all over livestreaming platforms: any friend who has had enough should move a finger and bravely report them under the new Advertising Law.

Chicken Soup That Seeps Into Everything

Chicken soup for the soul has been annoying people for years. After drinking it passively for so long, though, we've noticed the recipe has been through several iterations. Today's chicken soup is no longer the Zhiyin magazine kind; it hides inside Zhihu answers that open with "let me start with a story from my own life," inside warm, tender-looking advertising, even inside sprawling anti-chicken-soup epics that serve the same soup upside down:

• The line flooding the Moments of small and mid-size local private-business owners: "the workplace doesn't believe in tears, and the truth about an internship is fetching takeout";
• I can't afford an apartment, and home-goods advertorials keep shouting "the apartment is rented, but life isn't" to talk me into spending more on renovating a rental;
• I look up a travel guide and the screen is full of "just go, whenever you feel like it" — I can go, but where is the transport and attraction information?
• I look up a fitness how-to and still get lectured: "if you can't control your own body, how will you control your life?"
• ……

It all sounds right, and none of it fills you up. What chicken soup does best is make things simple: leave a few books on the subway and everyone becomes wiser and sharper; take off on a whim and your soul is cleansed and you live a different, freer life …… Life is hard enough already. Can we stop using chicken soup to con people?

Snark-Driven Bandwagon-Jumping

Watching the Spring Festival Gala, reading Mimeng, buying a ticket for The Great Wall — all to take part in the mass roasting session on Moments …… People spend money and time following the crowd in order to mock something. The aim is criticism; the effect is generous sponsorship, to the point that being "packed with things to mock" has become a feature that pulls in both eyeballs and cash.

In our Lab's most recent call-out, "Which 'fun' things are really just feeding this society's boredom and vulgarity", three of the top eight answers were about watching bad movies in order to mock them: "all kinds of variety shows made into feature films that still take over 100 million yuan at the box office" (1,061 votes), "a film deliberately stirs up controversy for attention, and even though it's obviously terrible people insist on going to see how bad it is" (434 votes), and "buying a ticket for The Great Wall just to mock it" (280 votes).

Knowing something is terrible and paying to consume it anyway, to see exactly how terrible, is not far from taking a deep breath after someone says "ugh, that stinks" in order to confirm "yes, it really does stink." A self-harming form of entertainment where you lose a thousand to cost your enemy eight hundred.

Winning the sharpest-tongue award at the Moments roasting session won't refund your ticket money. The only winner in the whole business is the bad film.

Cover image and illustrations by Lin Xiaoyao

QDaily Research Lab is a survey column at QDaily, an interactive platform for exploring all kinds of lifestyle questions. It may look at changes and trends in how people live, or at a particular brand's service. Here you can vote, vent and take a stand.