I think that people in general and especially online tend to get tangled up between form and function, and in doing so they sort of efface the meaning of a term and it starts to take on the shape of a floating signifier as this process progresses. I'll explain this in a simple way at the end if it's difficult for anyone to grasp.
Originally the term debatebro was used as shorthand to describe a loose collection of traits and behaviours in a pejorative way. That's from the perspective of function.
The form that this takes is using key words like premise, logical conclusion, strawman, fallacy etc. and maybe even structuring arguments in the shape of individual propositions divided by bullet points or indented numbers.
So when people aren't looking at the function but simply the superficial form, they'll accuse people of being debatebros for saying something like "Your argument is not cogent" because that sounds like something a debatebro would say but it ignores the purpose of such a statement and what it's being used in service of. (Again, I always seem to go back to this same issue of liberalism; assessing things as static, atomised phenomena that exist independent of context or history and without relations to anything else.)
The problem therein is that people have a knee-jerk reaction to anything that superficially resembles debatebroism and they'll make unfounded accusations based on vibes alone.
To make the form/function thing a bit clearer, there's an interesting phenomenon in the terminally online anti-communist left debatebro spheres - there's a trend of saying that the content creator Hakim has a rantsona.
When you assess this from the perspectives of form vs function, it's pretty clear that there's a massive leap being made when people make that accusation.
A rantsona is the use of an avatar as a representative of a person's emotional responses and reactions. The rantsona concept is closely tied to reaction content, edgelordism, and quite literally just ranting about culture wars and similar things. They're also known for being contrarian and having hot takes.
When we look at the functional aspects of a rantsona and compare that to Hakim, who has a profile picture of a stylised Lenin, it doesn't stack up. He doesn't use the pfp as an avatar, he doesn't show emotional reactions to things via an avatar, and he doesn't do reaction content (making the important distinction between that and response content here) and he doesn't really do rants but instead is overwhelmingly a video essayist.
Basically what the rantsona accusation amounts to is "Hakim uses a pfp that is an image of a person, rantsonas use the image of a person, therefore Hakim is using a rantsona."
This, in effect, reduces the fairly complex concept of a rantsona down to one simple element - a profile picture - and in doing so it expands the definition or dilutes it to the point that it could be applied to virtually any situation. The same can be said of how the term debatebro gets misapplied.
I think that people in general and especially online tend to get tangled up between form and function, and in doing so they sort of efface the meaning of a term and it starts to take on the shape of a floating signifier as this process progresses. I'll explain this in a simple way at the end if it's difficult for anyone to grasp.
Originally the term debatebro was used as shorthand to describe a loose collection of traits and behaviours in a pejorative way. That's from the perspective of function.
The form that this takes is using key words like premise, logical conclusion, strawman, fallacy etc. and maybe even structuring arguments in the shape of individual propositions divided by bullet points or indented numbers.
So when people aren't looking at the function but simply the superficial form, they'll accuse people of being debatebros for saying something like "Your argument is not cogent" because that sounds like something a debatebro would say but it ignores the purpose of such a statement and what it's being used in service of. (Again, I always seem to go back to this same issue of liberalism; assessing things as static, atomised phenomena that exist independent of context or history and without relations to anything else.)
The problem therein is that people have a knee-jerk reaction to anything that superficially resembles debatebroism and they'll make unfounded accusations based on vibes alone.
To make the form/function thing a bit clearer, there's an interesting phenomenon in the terminally online anti-communist left debatebro spheres - there's a trend of saying that the content creator Hakim has a rantsona.
When you assess this from the perspectives of form vs function, it's pretty clear that there's a massive leap being made when people make that accusation.
A rantsona is the use of an avatar as a representative of a person's emotional responses and reactions. The rantsona concept is closely tied to reaction content, edgelordism, and quite literally just ranting about culture wars and similar things. They're also known for being contrarian and having hot takes.
When we look at the functional aspects of a rantsona and compare that to Hakim, who has a profile picture of a stylised Lenin, it doesn't stack up. He doesn't use the pfp as an avatar, he doesn't show emotional reactions to things via an avatar, and he doesn't do reaction content (making the important distinction between that and response content here) and he doesn't really do rants but instead is overwhelmingly a video essayist.
Basically what the rantsona accusation amounts to is "Hakim uses a pfp that is an image of a person, rantsonas use the image of a person, therefore Hakim is using a rantsona."
This, in effect, reduces the fairly complex concept of a rantsona down to one simple element - a profile picture - and in doing so it expands the definition or dilutes it to the point that it could be applied to virtually any situation. The same can be said of how the term debatebro gets misapplied.
ironically i found the whole rantsona thing far less understandable than the first half.