by noahbrier on 4/26/22, 1:00 PM with 47 comments
by Barrera on 4/26/22, 1:44 PM
Nope.
Scroll to the bottom and hopes surge because there's an image. People staring at their phones while standing next to each other. One of them has a strange grin. But it's actually an ad to "McKinsey's unique insights" as an app. Maybe?
Nope. It occurs in the footer. McKinsey is sponsor of the post.
Have I just been shitposted? I am more confused now than I was before clicking the link.
by ryeights on 4/26/22, 2:14 PM
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.
by OrvalWintermute on 4/26/22, 1:50 PM
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.
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's preconceptions about the quality of a post, or lack thereof.
Civility is important.
by incomingpain on 4/26/22, 1:17 PM
Nobody understands shitposting. It's not meant to be understood. It'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.
by thinkingemote on 4/26/22, 1:30 PM
At some point I've noticed that shitposts can follow an earnest troll, somehow detoruning it, and making it different, and therefore neutralising it to some extent. It's still unwanted, but in a low cost and toxic environment as the article suggests, it's a way to survive.
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.
by Zababa on 4/26/22, 3:53 PM
There's something missing here: the people on the receiving end of the shitpost have to not really know if you're being serious or not.
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'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.
Why was this a joke and not shitposting ? Because it was made between two people that know each other'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't know my beliefs on covid, and may take the joke seriously.
Unless that's what shitposting is, just a joke. It'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're face to face you can often see signs that a person is joking, unless the person actively hides them. With text, it's the opposite: unless you add explicit signs that you're joking, it's hard to know if you're serious.
by PaulHoule on 4/26/22, 1:18 PM
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.
When I have an experience like that I think "What a bunch of sheeple!" and from the viewpoint that "it's all about the karma" I think I'd do better publishing something worse that exploits the vulnerabilities of the community to put up a big score.
by JohnWhigham on 4/26/22, 3:40 PM
by McLaren_Ferrari on 4/26/22, 1:54 PM
When it's just one person doing that it's great to make you stand out from the crowd....when it'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's the way you standout from the crowd in such instances.
As a society we have not yet reached that crossover yet, certanely SV hasn't... but in certain communities online you see it as begins to happen.
There is nothing magic or better about shitposting, it's a way to differentiate oneself from the rest, so it's only natural that when everybody is shitposting you want to do the opposite.
It'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'll be rewarded if you can hold this behavior long enough.
What you don'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
by soyrunner on 4/26/22, 7:11 PM
by soyrunner on 4/26/22, 7:15 PM
by hamiltonians on 4/26/22, 3:45 PM
by soyrunner on 4/27/22, 3:17 AM
by h2odragon on 4/26/22, 1:44 PM
The un-examined question is "where did the demand for dignity online come from?" Why is "shitposting" a bad thing? "to be amusing" is not in itself a bad goal. When its expressing contradiction its frowned on.
Often it is a frustrated alternative to the controversial discussion that should be happening, but can't because of groupthink.