"Virtue signaling" is an empty phrase - implicitly it's an accusation that the speaker doesn't actually believe what they are saying, and are only saying it for

"Virtue signaling" is an empty phrase - implicitly it's an accusation that the speaker doesn't actually believe what they are saying, and are only saying it for the approval of others. Not to mention, typically when the accusation is leveled, no attention is given to which virtues are being signaled, and why such virtues are bad. This is a common rhetorical trick and it's frustrating how often it works - rather than arguing the specifics of a situation (which the arguer finds difficult to justify) a more general, more vague, and more obfuscated point is argued instead. See also the OP and "betting a project against a technology", as an accusation of close-mindedness, which is amusingly vague. The blog post makes a point against a specific technology and goes to lengths to describe its reasoning, but a murkier, more abstract argument is made instead to color the company as somehow luddite-like.