First post

"First Post!" is a strange phenomenon in Internet discussion groups (particularly Slashdot and LiveJournal) similar to a marking of territory. Site participants race to be the first to add a comment ("post") to a new article. These comments have no use and usually do not contain any text other than "First post!" or variations thereof. The "First Post!" text may vary according to the site's content; trolls on Blog for America used "44!" as their First Post! text. (Howard Dean, if elected, would have been the 44th President.) The purpose of a First Post! was originally a novelty expression of the poster being impressed that they managed to get first post: "OMG I got First Post!", but now seems mostly intended to annoy site users, allow the more bitter and bile ridden members to rant about first post "losers", and entertain the site trolls by allowing them to race for the "honour" of being on the top of the (chronologically-ordered) list of comments. This has evolved into an element of the troll subculture (cf. Slashdot trolling phenomena), and is common on many popular user-commentary sites today (it does not usually appear on conventional webboards, community journals, etc). The phenomenon generally only appears on sites which have attained a certain mass popularity. If the site gets to the point where people are genuinely surprised to see a new article/official thread without any associated comments (usually because it was only posted moments before), then some strange urge will well up in certain people to express the fact that they were indeed the 'first' to add a comment. Some forums have devised creative ways of dealing with this. For example, the filters on Fark.com message boards automatically turn the words "First Post!" into the word "boobies" and automatically timestamp the comment 12 hours after it was actually posted. See also: Flamebait, Internet troll, Slashdot trolling phenomena.