What is “a not bad behavior”, and what to do with bad behaviors?

People are having different standard on “what is good”. Specifically, many people enjoy commenting on others’ behavior. This’s not strange: expressing opinions is a way to “being an individual”, just like I’m writing to record my own thoughts (to be acknowledged by others or not).

If you know sth about the live stream in China, you may know many “网红” (Internet celebrities) who are “professional” in commenting on others’ behavior. The common way to attract more audience is to be “absolute” on one side, which means to be absolutely against or support sth. This idea of course works well no matter if they are really “absolute” or not, because those sharp words can easily attract people’s attention.

The streamer: “If one does xxx, he/she is fool.” (Of course the real words are different, for example, being sacarsm or rude). The audience: “Oh yeah! I agree! That’s why I am smarter than him/her.”

While I won’t say such streamers have negative impact on the society, because people enjoy the entertainment (though some audiences become believers of those streamers). However, even if knowing those comments are cheap, it is still important to think about the behavior being commented.

How to simply judge while entertaining those comments? Here is a simple rule: “If one’s behavior is not hurting others, then it is not bad.” While this doesn’t mean to have a standard on “what is good”, it is important to get rid of venting negative emotions on others’ behavior.

This might be not important for many people. A common logical fallacy is to justify the comment by “If they are free to do sth, then I am free to comment on them.” However, being free is not equal to being good. The behaviors are not hurting others, but the comments can be.

Let me list some of those “网红” in different categories:

1. 带篮子、峰哥
2. 大头鹰、汤姆张
3. 张雪峰、辛吉飞

The first category is the jesters: basically most audiences are simply there to listening the radical comments, and they don’t care about the correctness. The second category is the “black-or-white” streamers: holding one side of the argument, and absolutely defending it for whatever reason. The third category is the “brainwashers”: they really behave like a “savior” and try to “save” the audiences. Though they are of different “level” of emotional venting, they share one principle: saying what the audiences expect to hear.

Those are my comments on those streamers. Obviously I am stating sth negative about them, but comming to the next point: what to do with the bad behaviors?

A common thing happens in Chinese Net is “banning” (封). This is kind of due to the vague rules on the Internet (for the reason everyone knows). The worse thing is that, people didn’t even realize that the “banning” is so irregular. When a negative news happen to sb, the first thing is to “eliminate” the person without considering if there is any evidence of the news, or if it is retional to “ban” him/her. Again, many many people are supporting this kind of behavior (which is obviously “over-blaming”), for the same reason as when they are commenting on others’ behavior: the negative emotions need to be vented.

(Conclusion) There are two different things: something shouldn’t be blamed, and something shouldn’t be over-blamed. The core idea is to not vent negative emotions on others: of course it’s hard (if not impossible) to always be positive, but it is important to be aware of your negative emotions and better not to vent them on others.

Disclaimer: This is a personal opinion. The reason I’m writing this Chinese-context article in English is filtering out the audience.