My personal gripe with articles like this one is that they invent their own terms to frame the discussion in a particular way, perhaps in the hope that some time in the future, people will really start talking about "Internet beefs" or "beefy conversations" or something equally silly. The issue isn't the length - after all, use as many words necessary - the issue is with the relative paucity of research into whether this topic has been addressed in the relevant fields (sociology, psychology, media studies).

Does the concept already exist in the literature? Are there any similar concepts?

Let me have a go at it. I call this "the hacker blogger mindset", in which relevant literature in the field is passed over or simply ignored (assuming due diligence has been taken to research the topic, which it often hasn't been) in favour of a kind of NIH-syndrome thinking in which every concept the author thinks of is novel, it has not been noticed before by lay people or the academic community, and of course it hasn't been written up into a snazzy article with nice jargon that makes us sound clever like "mook manorialism". We'll throw a reference to Francis Fukuyama or Weber in there to convince the more skeptical that this is more than an unsubstantiated blog post.

A famous guardian of the hacker blogger mindset is Scott Alexander[0] (and to a lesser extent Paul Graham and the LessWrong community), but it's nice to see new contestants who want to try their hand at sociological analysis without referencing any sociology. I hope I'm not being too crude when I say that essays like this are a kind of poor man's academy. You don't have to learn about standing objections to the theory (or the theory's assumptions) made by experts, because I called my theory "internet beef", and the remarkably similar academic theory that already exists isn't called "internet beef" - so none of your objections are valid against my internet beef!

The optimist inside me wants to think that this topic hasn't been covered before, and that the essay addresses a problem that hasn't been addressed before. If that were the case, however, I would have expected the author to at least state as such - that after reading tens of papers on discourse analysis and Internet sociology, nothing similar to "Internet beef" showed up. Maybe I'm wrong and being unfair to the author - in which case, fair enough. Unfortunately, it doesn't negate all the other times I've seen this.

[0] Scott wrote a whole post on his blog about a particular German philosopher. As it turns out, he hadn't read any of the philosopher's works, but only Peter Singer's much-criticized entry in the Short Introductions series. This was sufficient. Likewise, the author of this blog post doesn't seem to have read up on Internet discourse analysis, a topic which a search on Google Scholar throws up hundreds of papers.