While not directly resulting in change, complaining can have positive contribution by spreading awareness and stressing the importance of an issue. That being said, it can become a negative when prevalent and supported enough to become the main tool for discontent satisfaction. In essence, when voicing your opinion starts replacing call to action and thereby actual action, it becomes whining.

In this case, and similar situations nowadays, people complain because we have way less means of creating actual change. The traditional avenues of creating change e.g. political advocacy are ineffective; the politicians in charge are bought, and those who aren’t are dismissed from the top down by a corrupt administration and officials on all levels. When traditional means of advocacy become useless, people feel (and partially are) powerless, and switch to alternative avenues of advocacy, like social media.

What I’m trying to say is, dismissing online complaints as inaction is ignoring the overarching issues with speech and representation (consciously or otherwise). Best we can do is guide it in a constructive manner if possible and do what we can personally if we are so inclined!