I opened the article hoping to see some examples of actual shitposting and explanations of what makes them shitposts, and not just trolling.
Nope.
Scroll to the bottom and hopes surge because there's an image. People staring at their phones while standing next to each other. One of them has a strange grin. But it's actually an ad to "McKinsey's unique insights" as an app. Maybe?
Nope. It occurs in the footer. McKinsey is sponsor of the post.
Have I just been shitposted? I am more confused now than I was before clicking the link.
I'd say the difference between a shitpost and trolling is malice. Trolling is done to get a rise out of someone while shitposting is meant to be treated as just detached absurdist humor.
With many people on social media being increasingly touchy about the slightest perceived offenses, calling something a shitpost acts kind of like how /s indicates sarcasm. IRL it's easy to tell when someone you know is joking when they say something that might be wrong or offensive, but the same mechanism doesn't necessarily exist online, thus the rise of "shitposting" as a term.
E.g. if I were to say something in favor of flat Earth theory, people who know me would instantly know I'm being absurd for the sake of humor but someone seeing the same posted online might assume I'm a flat Earther.
Possibly, yes. I have noticed a de-grumpifying effect over the past year or so. Early Hacker News had a strong pedantic voice that bordered on parody, almost painfully so when discussing inoffensive topics.
Maybe it’s been Dang’s gradual moderation work or a natural shift in the community, but people here seem to have relaxed…a bit.
> a deliberately provocative or off-topic comment posted on social media, typically in order to upset others or distract from the main conversation.
Note that words like provocative and upset may lead you to automatically assume every shitpost is highly offensive in political or cultural sense, but that’s not the case. A lot of more recent “shitposts” achieve the same effect by just upping the absurdism.
I've noticed that many shitposts take the focus of the trolling from external to internal. That's what makes them so good. Self-deprecation is always better than attacks on another person.
And I find absurdist shitposts that don't offend people or deprecate the bearer much healthier. No one gets mad, and no one trades their self esteem for laughs.
The best thing about grandfather clocks is that they will always tell you the time. You may not like it, but it is a fact you must accept. Nobody appreciates father time, but he knows best.
Like the best shitposts, I’ve spent time reading it and gotten absolutely nothing in return; if nothing else, it shows that the author knows the subject matter
Meta, no? Like watching that gif with that truck thats about to hit the bollard and then 5 minutes has passed whilst you waited for a payoff that never comes.
Just go to @dril on Twitter. The king of shitposts.
@dril leads you down a rabbit hole into Weird Twitter[0] where you see nothing but low-effort posts not designed to especially go viral or to make lots of friends, but posted anyway despite the low quality.
>Usage of the term has grown steadily since it emerged around 2015 […] This is all ancient Twitter history. There was no such thing as shitposting back then.
Sorry, no. Shitposting wasn’t “invented” in 2015 and it certainly didn’t emerge from the bowels of Twitter. Little difficult to take this blogpost seriously.
2008 too on another archive https://archive.wakarimasen.moe/_/search/text/shitpost/order.... Disclaimer: this is a 4chan archive, open at your own risk. Both seems to start between the 20th and 30th February 2008. It could be an interesting work of internet history to try to find the earliest usage and its spread.
Here's an example of "shitposter" being used in early 2005. The posts won't load for me but the dates and titles are visible. I can personally recall earlier instances from other archvies dating all the way back to 2001, but I can't find those anymore.
Yeah the phrase was common on forums in the 2000s. Shitposting was like circle jerking today, adding nothing to the discussion but just “bullshitting.” I thought that’s where the term originated
I think the term appears to be another one stolen from Internet subcultures that were primarily forum driven, and were using it way earlier than 2015.
My problem with the term is that it was actively weaponized against innovation, or out of the box thinking. Part of a popularity contest of sorts.
While I have my own ideas about many things, I love to consider other points of view without pre-judging them, or reusing another person's preconceptions about the quality of a post, or lack thereof.
Shitposting is a subsection of trolling. There's certainly a degree of a art to shitposting.
Nobody understands shitposting. It's not meant to be understood. It's the equivalent of grabbing both the red and blue pill from Morpheus to see how high you get. Only to find out you end up in Canada.
I like the idea of separating shitposters from trolls.
At some point I've noticed that shitposts can follow an earnest troll, somehow detoruning it, and making it different, and therefore neutralising it to some extent. It's still unwanted, but in a low cost and toxic environment as the article suggests, it's a way to survive.
What would be a HN shitpost? Perhaps an overlong comment combining topics about freedom of speech, how the site sucks on mobile, and some kind of opinion about apple.
> Shitposting is posting that is completely detached from one’s real thoughts and beliefs, in the interest of being amusing.
There's something missing here: the people on the receiving end of the shitpost have to not really know if you're being serious or not.
For example, recently one of my friends remarked that more and more people they know are getting covid. I replied that by believing in the virus for 2 years, we finally manifested it in reality. I don't believe that covid just appeared. That was something completly detached from my thoughts and beliefs, in the interest of being amusing. But that was just a joke.
Why was this a joke and not shitposting ? Because it was made between two people that know each other's beliefs around covid, and can obviously identify this as a joke. Now if I post the same thing without context as a top comment on an article about new covid cases on HN, that would be shitposting. Most people here don't know my beliefs on covid, and may take the joke seriously.
Unless that's what shitposting is, just a joke. It's hard to find a difference between one person that jokes all the time and one that shitposts all the time. Maybe the difference is that when you're face to face you can often see signs that a person is joking, unless the person actively hides them. With text, it's the opposite: unless you add explicit signs that you're joking, it's hard to know if you're serious.
The other day I posted what I thought was a link to a good web page to HN. By the time the page had scored 15 points the traffic had crashed the web server. The article got about 60 votes total, mostly from people who never saw it, because of the clickbait value of the title.
When I have an experience like that I think "What a bunch of sheeple!" and from the viewpoint that "it's all about the karma" I think I'd do better publishing something worse that exploits the vulnerabilities of the community to put up a big score.
Where you see a bunch of “sheeple” voting stuff up without even looking at it, I see a bunch of thoughtful people trying to validate you for something promising you tried to share.
To me, it reads like the community isn’t stingy with Free Internet Points and is happy to share some with you since you seemed to be looking for them.
I’m not sure what you brain is trying to do for itself in leaning into the cynicism and writing all that off as “sheeple” behavior.
That article that was successful despite being unavailable had a clickbaity headline on the subject of institutional legitimacy. I can't get a single vote on meaty articles related to the topic like articles about Jurgen Habermas and his work.
I think for the most part when I write and post better things I get a better score. Frequently I acknowledge that things I wrote that got downvoted deserved to get downvoted.
There are still times I think the community can be easily played by submitting certain things that are pretty thin and still get upvoted. On the other hand, I've found that posting or commenting anything about
such as "the collective action problem is the asteroid that has mankind's name on it" gets a poor reception that I think is undeserved (It has broad applications across political science, one of them is that the common understanding of how "minorities" relate to majorities is completely wrong, something that gets discovered in the aftermath of elections in the US and immediately forgotten...)
Then there are those days that I just want to write a shitpost and I am proud about it in a perverse sense and don't care about getting voted down.
I really cannot get my head around people losing their mind that Elon bought Twitter. You realize every other social media company is also run/financed by billionaires too, right?
I think people don’t care for the fact that he considers himself an edgelord or don’t agree with him otherwise. For some he represents the nicest version of the worst of the internet. For others he’s a hero and force for good.
Shitposting is like Zuck wearing a t-shirt and flipflops during meetings with investors and banks.
When it's just one person doing that it's great to make you stand out from the crowd....when it's everybody doing it, then you better wear your black suit and tie like you work at Goldman Sachs and also sport your highest Ivy League vernacular because that's the way you standout from the crowd in such instances.
As a society we have not yet reached that crossover yet, certanely SV hasn't... but in certain communities online you see it as begins to happen.
There is nothing magic or better about shitposting, it's a way to differentiate oneself from the rest, so it's only natural that when everybody is shitposting you want to do the opposite.
It's like Rotschild said. Be fearful when others are greedy and viceversa. Works with social trends such as politics, fashion etc. Do the opposite of what people in your surroundings do and chances are you'll be rewarded if you can hold this behavior long enough.
What you don't want to do is give in and abandon your differentiation right when the tide starts turning, like all the guys who bought the very top of the Nasdaq in 1999
If any image of Trump on TV or the internet, got immediately muted the instant he opens his mouth, and a balloon imposed on the screen having the words SHITPOST, I could live with it.
No. It's denial of free speech for monetary gain. Branding a comment as a shitpost is akin to controlling the narrative. Controlling the narrative was a corporate tactic from 10 or 15 years ago. If a product was heading for a tough times, e.g. a threat regarding climate change, they'd get out front with a spin that evoking an emotional defense such that duped followers would find it very difficult to reposition. For instance Mt. Gox stolen bitcoin that was worth about $700,000 when btc was around $60k, was pegged as having a value of about $5.3k by the Japanese bankruptcy court rather than accepting that its value would be changing over time. The result was the trustee in this one instance was obligated to pay $5,300. But Coinlab, continuing to accumulate billable hours even after being effectively warned off by the SEC fraud division, sued for $75,000,000, then up'ed it to $16,000.000,000 ($75 million to $16 billion). Then they teamed up with Fortress (you know those guys, they buy up starter homes or used starter homes in good locations, offering well more than a typical young couple can pay, 20% or more over asking). The Fortress/Coinlab team had the trustee put a choice before the Mt.Gox depositors who by now had been waiting years for some recompense. The depositors voted to take the offer that was something like getting 2 btc it your Mt.Gox loss was 10btc. Of course 2 BTC is better than 0.013 btc (btc around $40k atm) but is sure as heck isn't 10 btc. I would post comments on reddit about not liking how long the process was being drawn out, how there was almost no communication, how the bankruptcy court created conditions where the trustee was only required to shell out a small fraction of the stolen btc's worth. Case in point, the Fortress/Coinlab lawyers were drawing out the process. Trustee sold btc at what is not a low price and gave that to Fortress/Coinlab. That money into btc would have accumulated well to finance more law suits. Drawing the process out allowed Fortress to offer a price around $10k/btc to depositors for their btc claims. And that's still going on. So, my complaining posts were okay but then the sub forum on reddit got a new moderator who quickly branded my posts shitposts and shadowbanned me. I suspect the moderator change went to a shill for Fortress, Coinlab or both. One point tho is that Fortress made offers for claims, they added a level of credibility to bitcoin. If Fortress wants the bitcoin then it has a value which will increase. Still if someone gets 2 btc from the deal when they had 10 btc on deposit, there's still 8 btc out there that the depositor won't have. There is a fix for this. Marc Karpeles hasn't left Japan to respond to an indictment in Chicago. Vinnik, the Russian who washed the stolen bitcoin, has much of it in wallets he controls, or did until the US seized his wallets. He's in jail in France. Suppose the US cracked Vinnik's wallets and made US Mt. Gox depositors whole and gave the remainder to the Mt. Gox bankruptcy trustee to work out what non-US depositors or Coinlab/Fortress will get. Then ban Marc Karpeles from ever traveling the US.
a "shitposting" is one you don't like, but don't want to dignify with the label of "misinformation", then.
The un-examined question is "where did the demand for dignity online come from?" Why is "shitposting" a bad thing? "to be amusing" is not in itself a bad goal. When its expressing contradiction its frowned on.
Often it is a frustrated alternative to the controversial discussion that should be happening, but can't because of groupthink.
The people I know who think “shitposting” is universally a bad thing are typically those who manage their communities with an iron fist, with very strict rules, even more so than HN. Often they aren’t very interesting places to visit.
Nope.
Scroll to the bottom and hopes surge because there's an image. People staring at their phones while standing next to each other. One of them has a strange grin. But it's actually an ad to "McKinsey's unique insights" as an app. Maybe?
Nope. It occurs in the footer. McKinsey is sponsor of the post.
Have I just been shitposted? I am more confused now than I was before clicking the link.