Are jabronis a necessity for a social media platform to be successful?

ccunning@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – -18 points –

I see a lot of jabronis hanging around Lemmy. Sometimes I wish they’d just go away, but I wonder if the ecosystem actually needs them.

23

What is a jabroni?

A Jabroni is like an antagonist or fall guy. I guess the term was popularized is professional “wrestling”.

Maybe “Griefers” would have been a better word to use?

I had no idea it had such a specific meaning. I heard it through Always Sunny, where it's used as a very generic insult.

I've heard some similar terms from wrestling/circus terms. Is a Jabroni distinct from a "Heel" or is it basically the same thing?

Is a Jabroni distinct from a "Heel" or is it basically the same thing?

I assumed they were the same but I’m far (far far far) from an expert.

Thanks for clarifying! I haven't heard it much, and all I really had in my head was something like "dudes".

There's a story, possibly apocryphal, about the Israeli Cabinet, after the surprise attack that started the Yom Kippur War, always requiring a "tenth man". The theory is that if nine people agree, then it is the duty of the "tenth man" to disagree, no matter what and no matter how much the other members pressure them. They are considered irritating but necessary to avoid dangerous group think.

I'm not sure I completely understand what you mean by a jabroni. Do you think they are the "tenth man" of our communities?

I don't think an antagonist is required, but it can be useful to some toxic communities.

What you really in a community are shitposters.

Well, a jabroni used to mean a jobber, a wrestler that's there just to lose, but make it look good.

In other words, it's someone with enough wrestling skill (and pro wrestling is genuinely a skill set, it's essentially stunt work) to make a big name wrestler look like they're extra good be virtue of having defeated the jabroni.

However, that was more or less an industry slang term. Jobber was supposedly used in boxing as well, and got picked up by early wrestlers, then spread among them and stayed "jobber" well into the eighties at least (and I can personally confirm that some of the wrestlers of that era used jobber, as I knew some of them to a degree, but that's a different subject).

Now, when it turned to jabroni within the wrestlers and the companies involved is more murky as best as I've ever found out. What is certain is that the term came to general awareness outside of wrestling when the Rock was using it as an insult. To the best of my knowledge he was the first wrestler to use jabroni on screen. He was certainly the first to use it extensively, and the one that spread it into pop culture.

So, somewhere between the late eighties/early nineties (when I met some wrestlers enough to have friendly chats with after turning down offers to be a jobber) and when the Rock started using the term jabroni publicly, it had become the predominant slang term within the wrestling community as well.

Now, my contact with wrestlers was pretty minor, it wasn't like it was an every day thing. We weren't friends, we just interacted. But one of the conversations in specific was basically that I could go to a training camp and work as a "jobber" for a few years, build up to maybe being in a more prominent role. And the term was used in other conversations as well. Being young at the time, I had to ask what the word meant, though context did make it pretty obvious.

But, after the Rock started using it as an insult, it has taken on other meanings in common use. So I had to read through the comments to see what you meant lol.

In truth, any social media platform does need jabronis in both the sense of regular users just doing their thing on the platform, and in the sense of some assholes making it a less comfortable thing.

It is my opinion that most people prefer to have someone to point to as bad. Having some trolls, assholes, and "class" clowns around keep a given platform from being boring, and allow the jabronis that do the day-to-day posts/comments to feel better about it.

What is certain is that the term came to general awareness outside of wrestling when the Rock was using it as an insult.

I definitely learned about it from the Iron Sheik using it. I wasn’t really watching any more by the time The Rock took off, but there certainly was a bump in popularity around then so it doesn’t sound unreasonable.

Holy crap, yeah! He did use it back in the day. He was so good at playing heel lol, but he was such a nice guy irl.

I enter the thread to see if OP was tripping and ended up learning things... thanks

I'm not sure how you're using the term here, since I know two definitions for it:

A) streetcorner loiterer

2] slang for testicles

Eiither are you talking about lurkers, or trolls, or shitposters, or what?

Lurkers may or may not be necessary. I'm not one, I couldn't say.

Trolls are not necessary, and in fact harmful to discourse.

Shitposters are very necessary, they are the leaven to discussion that makes it fluffy and digestible.

I clarified in another comment (or at least tried to 😅).

I’m not familiar with those definitions for jabroni, but troll would be the closest of the options you mention but maybe more of a troll/shitposter hybrid…

I don't know if I'd say necessity, more like inevitability.

Exactly what I was going to say.

Success leads to attention, which leads to more members, more members means an increased chance that some of them are jabronis.

…ooof…turns out the jabroni was coming from inside the house all along…