Shitpost
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| Synonyms: | crack post, night blogging |
| See also: | meme |
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Shitpost is a term that came into use on Tumblr and has spread across internet platforms. Using the term acknowledges that the content may be low-effort and upolished, but the user is self-aware and it can nonetheless be amusing.
1. (noun) any content on the internet whose humor derives from its surreal nature and/or its lack of clear context. Differs from a meme: whereas a meme's humor comes from its repeatability, a shitpost is funny simply because it isn't a predictable repetition of an existing form. Shitposts can become memes, but memes cannot become shitposts.
2. (verb) to create such a post[1]
Shitposting is perhaps a later development of night blogging, a term which gained popularity on Tumblr in 2012, but fell out of fashion.
Night blogging begins usually around 11pm, and finishes in the early morning. Bloggers on tumblr will blog strange things, sometimes deep yet completely messed up, sometimes utterly meaningless, sometimes gifs of stupid things, and sometimes bloggers will even go as far as to question the existance of humanity in those few strange hours. The posts that are reblogged are generally irrelevant to the theme of the users blog, but yet the post is considered acceptable, because of course, it is night. [...] usually, if a blogger is online at night, they will find very strange posts on their dashboard.[2]
A Tumblr conversation from 2015 explores the differences between shitposting and nightblogging thus:
[adhdsmokescreen]
Ok but why don’t people understand there is a difference between nightblogging and shitposting??
nightblogging is like “What if apples screamed when we bit them?”
Shitposting is like “a crisp one donger bill”
One is more coherent than the other.
[sjwpanderer]
i’m glad we’re focusing on the important issues here at tumblr.com
[upthawolfs]
nightblogging has more of a focus on theoreticals, especially in stating absurd thoughts in normal ways. think the kind of stuff your best friend says to you at a sleepover at 3 am after the lights have gone out and neither of you have slept in 20 hours or more– a “what if” question isn’t unsual in and of itself, but the unreal subject matter (apples screaming when you bite them) makes it funny. shit posting is more often the opposite, stating normal things in ways that make them absurd. “a crisp one dollar bill” isn’t funny or unusual, but replacing “dollar” with the absurdist internet word “donger” is what makes it funny & thus a shitpost. it’s not necessarily that one is more coherent, but that they’re differentiated both by form and by lexicon. nightblogging is surrealism, shitposting is dada
References
- ^ by MaddieHue May 02, 2018 on Urban Dictionary
- ^ Night Blogging August 11, 2012
- ^ Conversation preserved at the Wayback Machine