First Post

First!!

In large forums, there is often a race to be the first to post in a new thread, while tending to not contribute to the topic at all. It's not limited to forums though; popular blogs also have a lot of people trying to be the first to comment, whether they have something to say or not.

Usually "First" or "Prime" are used as placeholders. (The Daily Kitten use "Pounce!".)

This trend tends to annoy bloggers to no end, especially those who prefer there is some resemblance of civility in the comments zone. Many websites, fed up with the trend, have a strongly enforced policy of erasing first comments that only say "first comment" or something similar, or even banning the repeat offenders. This has had the side effect of people becoming more creative into announcing his first place in the thread and getting away with it:

• In some systems with Tree-style comments (like LiveJournal and similar systems) usually the comments of "first!" are added as a reply to the real first by the same commenter.
• In Spanish-language political blog Escolar.net, first commenters try to sneak the word "prime" while still being relevant to the theme.
• On the news-aggregator website fark, this is averted by a word-filter. "First post" is changed to "Boobies", while "first comment" is changed to "Weener". If either of those phrases occurs in a post which is actually the first post in a given thread, the post's timestamp is moved 12 hours into the future, virtually guaranteeing that it will be the last post in the thread (or lost in the middle, for long-running threads). This also causes some interesting effects when talking about prior posts that have been made: "As I said in my Boobies, this article is clearly mistaken!"
• Some forums have people that dutifully wait for a thread to be started and immediately say anything but "first".
• This is irritatingly common on YouTube with the comments beneath the video. Expect anyone who uses it to be 'thumbed-down' to oblivion before long.
  • Luckily comments on Youtube display the latest as first, thus mitigating the harm done by these kinds of posts.
• First commentators on entries at The Onion's AV Club often make a big show of working in the word "first", followed by others writing things like "canceraids" and "die in a fire." Some might even mock the AV Club writer who wrote the piece who got the first comment and used it to write a post script to the article. They may enjoy this too much. This is often met with eyerolls by longtime posters, who actually want to get to legitimate discussion.
• The phenomenon of posting first is parodied in this video.
• On The Escapist boards, specifically the Zero Punctuation threads, such posts often result in the poster being banned. With ZP videos, this happens for *anyone* who makes a post within the first few minutes of the video being posted online, since they could not have possibly watched the video in the time.
• If a forum or another site with comments have a comment limit that locks the topic from more comments when the limit is reached, people may try to spam the forum with useless garbage posts to fill up the last nick of space to reach the final post that locks the thread, usually posting something like "LAST!" or any other variation. This is pretty much the same as "FIRST!" but for the very end of the topic instead.

Compare the concept of Thread Necromancy, and the catchphrase "posting in legendary thread".