The Good User Paradox

Since the inception of GoAnimate, three distinct factions of users have been determined; the so-called "good users", the so-called "bad users", and the so-called "non-siders." From the names of these factions, it may be inferred that they can easily be distinguished by how they behave and by the moralities which they possess, although the truth is far from it. In all actuality, the faction a user belongs to is determined not by their merit, behaviour or morality, but by a set of arbitrary criteria which are both contradictory to the names of the groups, and increasingly unforgiving in their enforcement. For example, the label of a "good user" is awarded to someone who belongs to one or more of a list of sub-groups, which clearly exclude the group which calls themselves the "UTube [sic] Troll Police ", which gives no room to account for whether the person who is in that group behaves themselves in a civil manner; instead, someone who is in the "UTTP" is placed on a blacklist of "bad users", as is anyone who disagrees with the opinions of anyone in the sub-groups which are not the "UTTP."

Further, the label of a "good user" is gained by showing a hostility, which is becoming ever more prevalent, towards anyone who dares to be different in the conformist, group-thinking GoAnimate community. This clearly contradicts the very essence of the words "good user", as hostility is not a manner usually present in good people; instead, in the mind of a sensible person, it would appear that the opposite case is true, that the person is actually a "bad user", a title gained through the inherent manner of the person being a malicious one. On more than several occasions I have witnessed this kind of hostility, and have even had some of the hostility directed towards myself, with those dishing out the hostility being outrageous enough as to say that they were the good users within the community, despite the directly preceding evidence contradicting their claim.

All this hostility ranges from the most minor, petty insults to full-blown racial slurs and death threats, for the most ridiculously childish reasons, such as making a video "ranting" on someone, making a video which shows favorable or at least ambivalent treatment of a fictional character from a medium not made for one's target audience, or even commenting. These reasons, in the minds of the good users, present them with a licence to spew out a plethora of various insults, threats, profanities and other such things, in a misguided attempt to vanquish the supposedly grave evil which these bad users spread. This misguided anger blinds the good users from any reason they would have otherwise had, leading them into an unfortunate pitfall of degeneracy and hypocrisy which any reasonably intelligent person could mirror and illuminate to them.

This leaves out the so-called "non-sider" faction, who are forced to label themselves by this name because they would rather not be seen as involved in the frankly juvenile and petulant arguments which the good and bad users are involved in. Even so, the "good user" faction would find a way to demonise the non-siders through various methods including false dilemmas (i.e. "if you're not with us, you're against us") and other logical fallacies, with the "bad user" faction having the decency to be sensible enough to not initiate malicious contact with the "non-siders." Therefore, in a seemingly unending spiral, the "non-siders" are even forced to drop that label and call themselves their own individual people, facing the same sort of consequences due to the unending hostility between the "good user" and "bad user" factions.

And this is all over an Internet animation making website.