I think the term "oppression olympics" is needlessly charged.

But it is a good question: Under what conditions will someone voice a complaint, and about what?

We learn early on that voicing certain complaints results in social punishment, even when those complaints are "valid" according to the stated moral aspirations of the community. If memory holds, the process of learning which complaints can be voiced is painful.

But at the same time, not all superficially negative self-disclosures are a true social loss: Signaling affliction seems to have been a subcultural strategy for quite a while, nowadays in teenagers, but we also have famous references to the over-the-top displays of grief and penitence from ancient (Judeo-Christian) cultures. And of course, complaints can also result in support, or can play a role in political games.

So there's a cost-benefit happening somewhere in the system, which we might hope to be reasonably specific about.

To touch on some controversies: There's a big push to reduce the dissonance between what we publicly accept as grounds for complaint and what we actually punish people for complaining about. Accepting for the moment that our stated principles are okay (which is where I expect you might disagree), this can still go wrong several ways:

1. People may mistake the aspiration for reality e.g. we tell kids they should complain about bullying and feel like we're making progress, but then we allow the system to punish kids just as harshly as ever after their disclosure, because we can't or won't change it.

2. Or we feel that offering non-complaint-based advice is perpetuating or accepting a discrepancy between "valid complaints" and "effective complaints", e.g. the outcry when someone suggests a concrete way to avoid being sexually assaulted, or voices a concern about "victim mentality" (the mistake of thinking that complaining is more effective than it really is, often because everyone is only pretending that we are going to take complaints more seriously now)

3. The project is eaten by political concerns e.g. we find ourselves debating exactly which groups get to participate in the new glasnost of complaining about complaint-hypocrisy.

4. A group becomes unable to exclude to bad actors who cloak themselves in the new language of moral progress. Social justice groups, who are very concerned with unfair exclusion, have this problem to a non-trivial degree.

The "Oppression olympics" is mostly point 3, with a bit of point 4. I'm actually far more concerned with points 1 and 2.