The definition at the top of this page is ours. No dictionary entry carries copypasta flooding, and this site does not invent authority for terms that do not have any, so it is worth saying plainly at the outset.
Copypasta on its own is an ordinary word, and Merriam-Webster defines it as data, such as a block of text, that has been copied and spread widely online. [1] That entry describes a thing — a piece of text with a habit of travelling. What this page describes is a use of that thing: posting the same block repeatedly, in one place, to bury whatever was being discussed there. Turning the object into a tactic is this site's own move, not the dictionary's.
The entry also carries a usage example, quoted from Morgan Sung, describing how a single tweet became a copypasta and was shared and applied across movies, TV, musicals, songs and books. [2] That example is about spread and reuse — the same block turning up, adapted, in places that have nothing to do with each other. It says nothing about flooding a discussion or about volume as a tactic, and this page should not be read as if it did. Everything from here about burying a conversation under repetition is this site's own reasoning, not anything the dictionary attests.
What makes it a tactic rather than a text
Nothing about a block of text is hostile on its own — the definition above does not even gesture at hostility. What turns it into a tactic, if anything does, is volume and timing: the same block posted enough times, close enough together, that whatever was actually being discussed becomes hard to find underneath it.
That means the tell is never in the words. The identical block can be a running joke a community keeps deliberately alive, or it can be dropped into an unrelated, ongoing conversation specifically to drown it out — same text, two completely different things happening.
Recognising it
- The same block, largely or exactly unchanged, posted several times in a short space
- It arrives in a conversation that was going somewhere, not in a place built for it
- Little else from the same accounts besides the paste
- The volume is doing the work, not the content — nobody engaging with it as a joke, just repeating it
Every one of these has an innocent reading. A community can genuinely enjoy the same in-joke enough to post it unprompted, several people can post a popular block within minutes of each other with no coordination involved at all, and an account that mostly posts memes is not thereby using them as a weapon. The pattern is about what happens to the conversation underneath, and that is often only visible after the fact, not from any single post.
The honest difficulty
Most copypasta is not this. The overwhelming majority of the same block appearing again and again is a community keeping a joke alive because the joke still works, and treating every recurrence as an attack makes a place hostile to its own culture.
That is the distinction worth holding onto: a copypasta a thread is enjoying together is not being flooded, no matter how many times it appears, because the volume is wanted. What changes the picture is not repetition itself but whether the repetition is displacing something — a discussion that was happening, in a place where the people having it did not choose the interruption. That is a judgement about a whole exchange, not about any one instance of the text, and it is easy to get wrong in either direction: calling an enjoyed joke an attack, or waving away a burial because the text itself is familiar and silly.
What to do
At this level, the usual advice applies without much complication, because a copypasta flood does not need anyone to answer it. It only needs to be there.
Don't answer the paste. Whatever it says, if anything, is not the point of it appearing many times over. Not replying denies it the one thing repetition is trying to produce: your attention landing on it rather than on whatever it buried. No one has tested whether that actually shortens a flood in practice; it is an argument from what the volume is for, not a measured result.
Don't compete with it. Trying to keep the original conversation alive underneath a flood, by replying faster or restating the point again, mostly adds more text to the pile it is burying you under.
If it is persistent, treat it as a moderation question rather than a conversational one. The people who run a space can see account and posting patterns you cannot from inside one thread, and they are better placed than you to decide what happens next.