Shitposting
A reader's summary of the habit of posting something deliberately worthless — and of how a joke that began in obscure corners of the web became a recognized style, and sometimes a political weapon.
The term at a glance
To shitpost is to post material that is intentionally absurd, off-topic, provocative or poor, usually as a joke and usually in large quantities. The word is both a verb and a noun: a shitpost is the item, a shitposter the person, and in some communities “shitposting” names a whole register of humor rather than a single act. Its rough edges are the point; a polished version would no longer qualify.
Origin
The term grew out of forum and imageboard culture in the 2000s, where a post that wrecked the thread's purpose was an old nuisance and eventually a deliberate pastime. No single coinage is reliably documented, and accounts of its first use vary by source. What is clear is that the word came from the same milieu as trolling and copypasta, and that it described behavior that existed long before anyone had a name for it.
History and context
The practice spread from small forums to large platforms as those platforms absorbed their users' habits. On Twitter, the account @dril became the reference point for absurdist posting from 2008 onward, while the term itself moved into general use over the 2010s. In 2016 it entered politics, as supporters of Donald Trump described the production of memes on imageboards and Reddit as a form of campaigning; the episode is often grouped with echo chambers and the radicalizing reputation of those spaces. A few years later, the trading communities around the January 2021 GameStop episode showed the style turning up in finance, where posts that looked like jokes were also coordination. Commentators have compared the pointless gesture to Dada, though the comparison is a critic's and the posters rarely invoke it. The platform's own incentives matter too: a feed that rewards reactions will reward whatever provokes them, including rage bait dressed as a gag.
Main ideas
Low quality as the point
A shitpost is content that is deliberately off-topic, absurd, crude or pointless, posted for its own sake. The quality judgment is built into the name: the poster is telling you in advance that the contribution is junk, and the humor is the gap between that admission and the effort that went into it.
A community's in-joke, not a broadcast
The form grew up on forums and imageboards, where regulars shared a stock of references that outsiders could not parse. A shitpost works as a membership test: you laugh if you know the lineage of the joke, and a stranger sees noise. That is part of why it travels badly when a platform pushes it in front of everyone.
The absurdist voice on a feed
The pseudonymous Twitter account @dril, started in 2008, is the usual example of the craft at its best: short, surreal, ungrammatical monologues in the voice of an aggrieved and confused man. Its lines became shared vocabulary, quoted far beyond the site, which shows a shitpost can be carefully written and still be called one.
Irony all the way down
Much shitposting is ironic, and some of it is ironic about irony. The poster can claim at any moment that nothing was meant seriously, which makes the form hard to rebut and easy to hide behind. It is the same mechanism Poe's law describes: without a marker of intent, a parody of an extreme view is indistinguishable from the view.
From joke to political tool
In the 2016 US election cycle, supporters of Donald Trump on imageboards and Reddit described their meme-making as a campaign of its own and, half jokingly, as a "meme war." Journalists and researchers debated how much of it moved votes and how much was self-congratulation, but it settled the point that the style could be used for persuasion, not only play.
A raid with a deniable face
Because a shitpost is officially a joke, the same format can carry harassment or propaganda with a ready defense: it was only a joke, and the person who took offense missed the irony. Moderators and researchers repeatedly describe this deniability as the hardest thing about policing the genre.
Critique
- The category is too elastic to measure. The label covers a carefully crafted surreal tweet, a thread-wrecking spam post and a political meme campaign. What one person calls a shitpost another calls art or propaganda, so claims about “shitposting” as a whole are usually claims about one corner of it.
- Irony protects the worst of it. The defense that it was a joke is available to everyone, including people who mean it. Critics argue that a style which can never be held to its content ends up laundering whatever it carries.
- It may be overrated as an influence. The 2016 story attributes a lot of effect to online jokes, and researchers who looked at it found the reach of the meme communities hard to separate from ordinary campaign coverage. The self-image of the posters is not evidence of their impact.
Impact
Shitposting changed what counts as speech on a feed. It made deliberate unseriousness a recognizable voice, which brands later copied in their own social accounts, to mixed results, since a joke that is sponsored loses its cover. It also left moderators with the problem of judging intent from a screen, the same problem the earliest flame wars exposed: plain text carries no tone, and an audience that cannot tell the joke from the position will argue about it either way.