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The Cultural Meaning of Shitposting

47 pointsby noahbrierabout 3 years ago

14 comments

Barreraabout 3 years ago
I opened the article hoping to see some examples of actual shitposting and explanations of what makes them shitposts, and not just trolling.<p>Nope.<p>Scroll to the bottom and hopes surge because there&#x27;s an image. People staring at their phones while standing next to each other. One of them has a strange grin. But it&#x27;s actually an ad to &quot;McKinsey&#x27;s unique insights&quot; as an app. Maybe?<p>Nope. It occurs in the footer. McKinsey is sponsor of the post.<p>Have I just been shitposted? I <i>am</i> more confused now than I was before clicking the link.
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ryeightsabout 3 years ago
&gt;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.<p>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.
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OrvalWintermuteabout 3 years ago
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.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;s preconceptions about the quality of a post, or lack thereof.<p>Civility is important.
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incomingpainabout 3 years ago
Shitposting is a subsection of trolling. There&#x27;s certainly a degree of a art to shitposting.<p>Nobody understands shitposting. It&#x27;s not meant to be understood. It&#x27;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.
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thinkingemoteabout 3 years ago
I like the idea of separating shitposters from trolls.<p>At some point I&#x27;ve noticed that shitposts can follow an earnest troll, somehow detoruning it, and making it different, and therefore neutralising it to some extent. It&#x27;s still unwanted, but in a low cost and toxic environment as the article suggests, it&#x27;s a way to survive.<p>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.
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Zababaabout 3 years ago
&gt; Shitposting is posting that is completely detached from one’s real thoughts and beliefs, in the interest of being amusing.<p>There&#x27;s something missing here: the people on the receiving end of the shitpost have to not really know if you&#x27;re being serious or not.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>Why was this a joke and not shitposting ? Because it was made between two people that know each other&#x27;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&#x27;t know my beliefs on covid, and may take the joke seriously.<p>Unless that&#x27;s what shitposting is, just a joke. It&#x27;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&#x27;re face to face you can often see signs that a person is joking, unless the person actively hides them. With text, it&#x27;s the opposite: unless you add explicit signs that you&#x27;re joking, it&#x27;s hard to know if you&#x27;re serious.
PaulHouleabout 3 years ago
Some of it is playing to the crowd.<p>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.<p>When I have an experience like that I think &quot;What a bunch of sheeple!&quot; and from the viewpoint that &quot;it&#x27;s all about the karma&quot; I think I&#x27;d do better publishing something worse that exploits the vulnerabilities of the community to put up a big score.
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JohnWhighamabout 3 years ago
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&#x2F;financed by billionaires too, right?
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McLaren_Ferrariabout 3 years ago
Shitposting is like Zuck wearing a t-shirt and flipflops during meetings with investors and banks.<p>When it&#x27;s just one person doing that it&#x27;s great to make you stand out from the crowd....when it&#x27;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&#x27;s the way you standout from the crowd in such instances.<p>As a society we have not yet reached that crossover yet, certanely SV hasn&#x27;t... but in certain communities online you see it as begins to happen.<p>There is nothing magic or better about shitposting, it&#x27;s a way to differentiate oneself from the rest, so it&#x27;s only natural that when everybody is shitposting you want to do the opposite.<p>It&#x27;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&#x27;ll be rewarded if you can hold this behavior long enough.<p>What you don&#x27;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
soyrunnerabout 3 years ago
A moderator tagging a post as a shitpost leads to shadowbanning. Even if the post is non threatening or libelous.
soyrunnerabout 3 years ago
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.
hamiltoniansabout 3 years ago
sjitposting = less serious trolling
soyrunnerabout 3 years ago
No. It&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x2F;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&#x27;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&#x27;s worth. Case in point, the Fortress&#x2F;Coinlab lawyers were drawing out the process. Trustee sold btc at what is not a low price and gave that to Fortress&#x2F;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&#x2F;btc to depositors for their btc claims. And that&#x27;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&#x27;s still 8 btc out there that the depositor won&#x27;t have. There is a fix for this. Marc Karpeles hasn&#x27;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&#x27;s in jail in France. Suppose the US cracked Vinnik&#x27;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&#x2F;Fortress will get. Then ban Marc Karpeles from ever traveling the US.
h2odragonabout 3 years ago
a &quot;shitposting&quot; is one you don&#x27;t like, but don&#x27;t want to dignify with the label of &quot;misinformation&quot;, then.<p>The un-examined question is &quot;where did the demand for dignity online come from?&quot; Why is &quot;shitposting&quot; a bad thing? &quot;to be amusing&quot; is not in itself a bad goal. When its expressing contradiction its frowned on.<p>Often it is a frustrated alternative to the controversial discussion that should be happening, but can&#x27;t because of groupthink.
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