The Cultural Meaning of Shitposting
whyisthisinteresting.substack.com
whyisthisinteresting.substack.com
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.
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.
And that is my ship toast for the day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://warosu.org/jp/?task=search2&search_text=shitpost&sea...
I'm sure it's trivial to find even older examples but this was just the first thing that sprang to mind.
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.
Civility is important.
Shouldn't that read "outside the box"?
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.
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.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
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’ll wait and see.
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
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.