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Shitposting

Also written: shit posting

Deliberately absurd, provocative or offensive posting, which at volume or at the wrong moment degrades a discussion without engaging with it.

Escalation:
Light / opportunistic
Type:
Bait

Where the term comes from

Lexicographic: Merriam-Webster carries the verb, marked vulgar, in both transitive and intransitive senses.

Whose definition this is

The one-line summary above is ours. The definition it compresses comes from a named source, quoted in full and linked below — where the two differ, the source is what counts. Everything else on this page that states a fact is sourced.

Contested usage: The word is often used affectionately, by people describing their own posting. Much of what gets called shitposting is not a tactic at all, and treating it as one is the fastest way to look humourless in a community you have just joined.

Merriam-Webster defines shitposting as posting something online that is deliberately absurd, provocative or offensive. [1]

It earns a place in this list not because it is usually harmful — it usually is not — but because of what it can do at volume and at the wrong moment: make a discussion unusable without anyone having to argue against it.

Why it works as a tactic, when it is one

Refuting an argument is work. Making a thread not worth reading is almost free, and it does not expose the person doing it to any counter-argument, because none was made.

It is also cheap to defend. Since nothing was asserted, there is nothing to retract, and objecting can be answered with "it was a joke" — which puts the burden of seeming humourless on you rather than on the post.

Recognising the tactical version

The distinguishing feature is timing rather than content:

  • It arrives when a conversation was going somewhere, not at random
  • It is aimed at the thread rather than at any participant
  • Objections are met with "it's just a joke", never with an argument
  • The same account does it repeatedly in the same place

Every one of these has an innocent reading. People are funny when they are bored, threads do wander, and someone who jokes a lot in one community is usually just a member of it. This is the weakest signal set on the site and should be held loosely.

What to do

Ignoring it is usually right, and this is the case the folk advice fits best — an untargeted post, with no particular audience for your reply, in a place where saying nothing costs you nothing. That is a narrower set of conditions than the advice is normally offered under, and it is worth noticing when they hold.

If it is persistent and aimed at a particular space, that is a moderation question rather than a conversational one, and the people who run the space are better placed than you to answer it.

Not the same as

Jokes
Communities run on absurdity, and a thread full of nonsense is often a thread of people enjoying themselves. What matters is whether it is displacing a conversation someone was trying to have.
Trolling
Shitposting is usually indiscriminate — it degrades whatever is nearby. Trolling picks a target and wants a reaction from them specifically.

Responding at this level

Disengagement works here and is almost always the whole answer. This is the band the folk advice was built for.

  • Don't feed the trolls →

    Declining to reply, so that provocation produces no reaction and no audience. The most repeated advice on the internet, and among the least examined.

Others at this level

  • Flamebait — Content posted mainly to provoke angry replies, where the reaction is the point and the topic is incidental.
  • Rage bait — Outrage-optimised content aimed at the recommendation algorithm rather than at any particular argument.
  • Engagement bait — Posts that ask for an interaction outright — tag someone, comment your birth month, like if you agree — to farm engagement signals.
  • Necroposting — Reviving a long-dead thread to restart a settled argument in front of people who have moved on.
  • Derailing — Steering a discussion away from its subject so the original point is never actually addressed.
  • Pedantry trolling — Using trivial technical corrections to dominate a conversation and imply the substantive point is wrong.

Sources

Last checked . Each quote below is verified against an archived copy of its source every time the site is built.

  1. [1] shitpost — Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Merriam-Webster [archived]
    “to post something online (such as a comment, video, or meme) that is deliberately absurd, provocative, or offensive”