shitpost

A shitpost is a deliberately low-effort, absurd or provocative post, made to be funny, to derail a conversation or just to get a reaction. Posting them is shitposting. The word itself is crude, so it’s often written as sh*tpost.

What shitposting means

Merriam-Webster defines it as posting deliberately absurd, provocative or offensive content, and labels the word vulgar. In practice it covers a wide range. At the harmless end are surreal memes, nonsense captions and terrible photo edits that only make sense if you’re very online. At the other end are posts made purely to disrupt a forum or annoy people.

A lot of people use it about themselves with affection: an account “for shitposting” is one where nothing is meant seriously. Wikipedia notes it’s sometimes called “trashposting,” and Know Your Meme lists a milder cousin, “funposting.”

Examples

• “Ignore that, I was shitposting at 2 a.m.”
• “This account is 90% shitposts and 10% cat pictures.”
• “He’s not making a real argument, he’s just shitposting.”

Where it came from

The word grew up on internet forums. Merriam-Webster’s records go back to the 1990s, while Know Your Meme’s earliest example comes from the forum Something Awful in April 2007, with an Urban Dictionary definition in January 2008. Wikipedia describes it spreading on imageboards like 4chan in the mid-2000s.

In 2016 it moved into politics, when groups flooding social media with crude memes during the US election drew wide media attention. Two years later, a Polygon writer compared shitposting to Dadaism, the early-20th-century art movement built on deliberate absurdity.

Shitposting vs. trolling

They overlap. Trolling is about provoking people. Shitposting can be provocative, but often it’s just nonsense for the fun of it, with no target at all.

Related terms

• Copypasta: text pasted around as a joke.
• Rage bait: content made to make you angry.
• Hot take: a quick, provocative opinion.
• Brain rot: endless low-quality content.

See more terms like this in our internet slang dictionary.