The history of shitposting is a testament to humanity’s timeless urge to create absurd, low-effort chaos for the sake of chaos. Defined as the act of posting deliberately provocative, off-topic, nonsensical, or aggressively poor-quality content to derail discussions, provoke reactions, or simply exist in irony, shitposting thrives on minimal effort yielding maximum psychic damage.
What began as forum spam has evolved into a dominant form of online humor, cultural critique, and even political weapon by the mid-2020s.
While the term “shitposting” itself is modern, its spirit predates the internet by millennia. Ancient graffiti serves as the original shitpost: Roman Pompeii walls (79 AD) featured low-effort insults like “Marcus loves cock” or boasts about sexual conquests, pure pointless provocation etched for passersby. Medieval manuscript marginalia included knights fighting snails, demons mooning readers, and random butts: chaotic, context-free doodles in sacred texts.
Fast-forward to WWII, where “Kilroy was here” (a bald figure with a massive nose peeking over walls) spread virally through Allied soldiers’ graffiti, baffling enemies and boosting morale with zero meaning. These examples prove shitposting is baked into human behavior: mark territory with nonsense, watch the world react.
The digital era proper began in the mid-2000s. The earliest documented use of “shitpost” appeared on April 10, 2007, when Something Awful Forums user OhSNAP!Tray complained about “worthless threads” full of unfunny in-jokes. By 2010–2011, the term exploded on 4chan, where boards like /b/ (random) and the later /s4s/ (shit 4chan says) weaponized it.
Shitposting meant spamming “le,” “xd,” rage comics, forced memes, and “that post gave me cancer” macros to derail threads. Encyclopedia Dramatica formalized it in 2011, linking it to /r/circlejerk on Reddit and 4chan’s ironic trolling culture. Reddit launched /r/shitpost in October 2012, cementing the practice across platforms.
The 2010s marked shitposting’s ironic golden age. Early waves included surreal humor (Bee Movie script copypasta, surreal Tinder bios) and anti-humor (Dat Boi, loss.jpg edits). Platforms like Tumblr and Twitter amplified it through raids and counter-raids: 4chan vs. Tumblr in 2014 saw waves of trolling, photoshopped horrors, and accusations of “winning” wars that never ended.
By mid-decade, shitposting gained political teeth: during the 2016 U.S. election, groups like Nimble America used memes maligning candidates, blending absurdity with propaganda. Esquire even speculated the 2020 election could be “all shitposting.”
The 2020s accelerated into “brainrot” territory. Post-irony layered with hyper-speed cycles: irony so deep it loops back to sincerity. Terms like “skibidi” (from the absurd Skibidi Toilet YouTube series, a wordless war of singing toilet-heads vs. cameramen), “rizz,” “gyatt,” “fanum tax,” and “sigma” fused into nonsensical slang, often AI-amplified on TikTok. Brainrot humor, maximal absurdity with zero context, dominated Gen Alpha feeds, spawning “Italian brainrot” creatures and endless crossover edits.
What started as forum derailment became a cultural force: low-quality content engineered for dopamine hits, short attention spans, and viral exhaustion.
Today, shitposting is everywhere, from government parody accounts to fashion roasts, and war memes.
Then there’s the people who make a living based on their work as shitposters. Like Charlie Light. Because of the quality of his content and his ability to write shitposts that go viral, he now makes $25,000+ a month as a writer.
Ultimately, shitposting reveals something profound: humans have always craved absurdity to puncture seriousness. In an age of endless content, the purest rebellion is deliberate meaninglessness.
The caveat? How soon will AI takeover shitposting? What will the neo-shitposting world look like?
No responses yet