What Is the Whiniest Country in the World? A New Site Aims to Provide a Definitive Answer

Of all the world’s countries, which is the most given to petty complaining? Depending on your own nationality, you may or may not have opinions on this question—but if you’re looking for an objective answer or just in the market for a place to air your own complaints, you may well be interested in a new website that aims to provide both these things.

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The site offers a place for the internet to air all its petty grievances. (You may well point out that we already have a place, and it’s called “social media”, which is true—but wouldn’t it be nice if people complained about dumb shit somewhere that wasn’t Facebook?) It’s called Petty Million, and as its name suggests, it’s aiming to collect a million petty gripes.

Given that it just launched, it’s got a long way to go before it hits seven figures—at the time of writing, there were 189 petty complaints sitting in its database. These can be filtered by category—work, food, technology, relationships, “British problems,” etc—and also searched directly. You can also vote on their validity: the site gives you the option to deem a comment “valid,” “too petty,” or “absolutely correct,” or urge the complainant to “seek help.”

Anyway, aside from the opportunity to air your pettiest grievances for all the world to see, the most interesting part of Petty Million is what it calls the Petty World Cup. This is a league table of gripes that ranks countries by “total complaint engagement,” which seems like a reasonable way of identifying the world’s whiniest country.

The fact that the site includes a category specifically for “British problems” provides a clue as to what it thinks the answer is, but so far, the Brits are only in second place on the pettiness table. The USA has submitted by far the most complaints, but they’re clearly not petty enough, because it only ranks third. Which leaves the question: which country is the most given to complaining?

Amusingly, the answer seems to be “none of the above”—or more accurately, “somewhere else,” a blanket category that the site assigns to aggregate countries apparently not worthy of complainant status in their own right. This, clearly, is not at all satisfactory, and the only sensible response is to… complain about it. So if you’ll excuse me—

This is a disgrace, I tell you. © Screenshot Gizmodo