A shitpost is a deliberately worthless, absurd or provocative online post, made to get a reaction rather than to inform. The term dates to at least 2007, when forum members began using it to describe junk threads.
The practice sits inside wider internet culture, where jokes, hostility and irony often blur together.
What counts as a shitpost?
Since 2008, the working definition has stayed close to the one a user named jarrynkell submitted to Urban Dictionary on January 4, 2008: “To make utterly worthless and inane posts on an internet message board.” The core idea is low effort paired with high intent. A shitposter is not trying to be accurate, helpful or even coherent. The goal is a response, whether laughter, confusion or outrage.
Three traits recur in most examples:
- Low effort on purpose. The post looks careless, crude or nonsensical, and that carelessness is part of the joke.
- Disruption of context. It is posted where it does not belong, or it derails a serious thread.
- Irony or provocation. The poster may be joking, baiting or both, and the audience is left to guess which.
The Daily Dot offered a compact version in 2016, calling a shitpost “a deliberate provocation designed for maximum impact with minimum effort”. That wording separates shitposting from simple bad posting. A badly written, sincere post is merely bad. A shitpost is bad by design.
Where the term came from
Wikipedia places the origin of the word around the mid-2000s on image boards such as 4chan. Know Your Meme, which tracks documented first uses, gives a more specific record. It says the earliest-known instance appeared on the Something Awful Forums on April 10, 2007, when a member named OhSNAP!Tray used the expression for worthless threads on the site’s BYOB forum.
The word spread quickly through other communities. On June 28, 2007, a Penny Arcade forum member named IHasABucket criticized other users for “shitposting” in a thread about electronic dance music. By early 2008 the word had an Urban Dictionary entry, which suggests it was common enough to need defining for outsiders.
The behavior itself is older than the word. Message boards had long dealt with spam, flooding and deliberate derailing. What changed in the 2000s was that a single compact label existed for all of it, and that the label could be used both as an insult and as a badge.
Shitposting as a style: irony, absurdity and in-jokes
Over time the word shifted from a complaint about other people’s posts to a name for a comic style. Know Your Meme lists “ironic shitpost is still shitpost” among the tags on its 2007-dated entry, a phrase that captures the genre’s central joke: claiming a post is intentionally bad does not change what it is.
Shitposts tend to take a few recognizable forms:
- Surreal image macros with captions that barely connect to the picture.
- Deep-fried or distorted images that look degraded on purpose.
- Non-sequitur text dropped into serious discussions.
- Reused phrases that spread as a joke, a close relative of the copypasta, which is a block of text copied and pasted across sites for comic effect.
Much shitposting also depends on online slang that only regulars of a given community understand. That gatekeeping is a feature. A post that confuses outsiders and delights insiders does its job.
Shitposting in politics and media
The political use of shitposting came to prominence during the 2016 United States presidential election. In September 2016, the pro-Trump group Nimble America drew wide media attention, and The Daily Beast described it as “dedicated to ‘shitposting’ and circulating internet memes maligning Hillary Clinton”.
Not every commentator was amused. Engineering & Technology magazine warned that shitposting, from the left or the right, was “perilously close to delivering an online metastasis” of a ritual hatred drawn from Orwell’s fiction. The worry was that a style built for laughs could also be used to pile onto people at scale, with the joking tone offering cover to anyone who later wanted to say it was only a joke.
The tactic also appears outside electoral politics. In March 2018, Chicago magazine described the Facebook group New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens (NUMTOT) as posts “meant to be awkward and irrelevant, aggravating and distracting social media communities from discussing their topic at hand”. Here the shitpost is a form of community play, not an attack on a campaign.
The Financial Times, as summarized by Wikipedia, also tied the term to disinformation, citing a made-up story that the British politician Jo Swinson had killed squirrels for fun. That example shows the dark edge of the genre: when a joke is built to travel without context, it can turn into a falsehood that people must publicly deny.
Shitposting in music and mainstream culture
By 2024, the style had moved into art. Writing for Pitchfork, journalist Kieran Press-Reynolds coined the term “shitpost modernism” for artists shaped directly or indirectly by shitpost culture. He cited Lil Yachty’s “Poland” and Saint Mercator’s “Da Biggest Bird,” along with the vocal style of Yeat and Yuno Miles. Argentine rapper AgusFortnite2008 has named internet shitpost culture as an influence.
Press-Reynolds also pointed to earlier precursors, including the “Pisscore” scene and artists such as Lil B and IceJJFish. The pattern is familiar: a behavior that began as forum noise became a recognizable aesthetic.
How to tell a shitpost from trolling or spam
The neighboring categories overlap, but they differ in intent. Spam wants clicks or sales. Trolling wants to upset a specific target. A shitpost wants attention and a laugh, and often has no target at all. The Wikipedia entry notes that shitposting may sometimes be orchestrated as part of a coordinated flame war to make a website unusable for its regular visitors, which is the point where it becomes harassment rather than humor.
A practical test: ask whether the poster would be comfortable being found out. A shitposter in a joke community usually would. A person seeding falsehoods would not.
Frequently asked questions
When was the word shitpost first used?
Know Your Meme records the earliest-known instance on the Something Awful Forums on April 10, 2007, by member OhSNAP!Tray.
Is a shitpost the same as trolling?
No. The Daily Dot defined a shitpost in 2016 as a provocation with “maximum impact with minimum effort,” while trolling aims at a specific target. The two overlap when a shitpost is used to bait people.
Can a shitpost be funny on purpose?
Yes. Know Your Meme tags the topic “ironic shitpost is still shitpost,” meaning that intentional humor does not stop a post from counting. Pitchfork’s 2024 “shitpost modernism” label treats the style as deliberate art.
When did shitposting become political?
During the 2016 United States presidential election, when groups such as Nimble America, covered by The Daily Beast in September 2016, circulated memes aimed at Hillary Clinton.
