First post

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"First Post!" is an Internet phenomenon on Internet discussion groups (notably Slashdot and LiveJournal), where participants strive to be the first person to "post" a comment to a new article or discussion thread. This terminology dates back to the days of the BBS, when one would post a comment, much as one would post a reply on a physical bulletin board.

From the user's point of view, there are advantages to making the first post. Prior to the emergence of more egalitarian technologies such as wiki, most discussion systems gave a first poster special rights over the discussion such as deleting comments that (only) the first poster rejected. By contrast, being first to create an article in a wiki doesn't provide any special editing privileges over it thereafter, and creating many new articles with little content is usually a way to attract scrutiny, rather than a way to gain status.

In addition to being confined to discussion group media, the phenomenon is largely confined to sites that have reached a high degree of popularity, such that users are genuinely surprised to see an article without any associated comments. In its original form, a first post was a light-hearted expression of the poster's excitement at being the first person to write a comment. However, it is now more widely intended as a means of annoying other site users (see Internet troll), with the aim of provoking a negative reaction (see Flamebait). There is also the necessary condition that comments are displayed in chronological order (meaning the first message is the most prominently displayed). It is prevalent among user-commentary sites and does not often appear on conventional webboards, community journals, etc.

Since the chance of achieving a first post is increased by making the comment quickly, the message is usually short, adding no insight to the discussion. Often, it only contains the text "First post!" (or variations thereof).

Since "First post!" messages annoy many users, some discussion groups have a wordfilter installed that automatically detects and removes or mangles these messages. For example, Fark.com automatically replaces "first post" with "Boobies"; and if the offending message really is the first post in the thread, the filter will also change the message's timestamp to 12 hours in the future, so that other users' messages will appear first when the thread is viewed.