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Comment by ChadNauseam | Hacker News Reader

This is a bit of a tangent (and a response to only the title, which I admit is bad form) but what’s with the prevalence of adding “bro” at the end of random words? Can a woman be a crypto bro or a tech bro?

It reminds me of when everyone was talking about “brogrammers” a while ago, and it had a pretty clear connotation of “programmer who loves keg stands, hitting the gym, and making misogynistic comments”. I think “crypto bro” and “tech bro” don’t have that connotation at all, or at least that’s never how I perceived SBF.

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> It reminds me of when everyone was talking about “brogrammers” a while ago, and it had a pretty clear connotation of “programmer who loves keg stands, hitting the gym, and making misogynistic comments”. I think “crypto bro” and “tech bro” don’t have that connotation at all, or at least that’s never how I perceived SBF.

I’d say they have related connotations. Less about explicit invocations of masculinity like beer and the gym, more about being egotistical or solipsistic or “highly confident in oneself while actually being wrong”. Not quite the same thing as the traits you mentioned, but associated with them, for better or worse.

While the bro meme emerged to describe the kegs and kettlebells thing, i think it's shifted to mean something like "someone massively overconfident who gets ahead through bullshit, backscratching, and reality distortion, rather than through actual talent".

Under this definition, women absolutely can be bros. And neither men nor women, nor anyone else, are usually bros, it's a rare thing.

The "crypto bro" stereotype came from real people who combined a love of crypto with bro behaviors like aggressive rhetoric, shameless self-promotion, and flaunting their wealth (e.g. talking about lambos all the time).

Women do that stuff too. I have seen women promote crypto scams as well. It is subtly misandrist to use these terms I think. But no one will stop using it because that is part of the society wide perception of men being viewed as less moral than women.

So maybe women can be bros too? Just like men can be karens and huns. But just as complaining in an of itself doesn’t make you a Karen, shilling a scam coin in and of itself doesn’t make you a crypto bro.

Unfortunately, because cryptocurrency is so male dominated the conspicuous presence of women is arguably a red flag (and somewhat ironically wrt your less moral comment). :-/ E.g. there were fewer women in the pipeline at the front and any women in the space take on a number of additional costs (e.g. harassment and misogyny) that a greater portion of what remain are only there because the are being paid handsomely to promote scams.

and this sterotype can easily be self-perpetuating...

You don't see the press calling Caroline Ellison a "crypto chick" or some other gendered epithet. You would never see that because it would be unacceptable whereas "crypto bro" is acceptable.

Women using aggressive rhetoric, shameless self-promotion, and flaunting their wealth are called lesser nice names.

People like calling others names rather than discuss the actual issues.

https://www.businessinsider.com/caroline-ellison-ftx-alameda...

I hope that one day we will live in a world where half of all crypto scammers are female. But today most of them are young men

Spend some time on dating apps. I would estimate in a call center environment there is a high number of female employees running the those scams off a script. All sorts touting their investment opportunities to anybody desperate enough to listen.

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