Dickrider / Dickriding

About

Dickrider or Dick Rider as well as Dickriding is a slang term used to describe someone who attempts to curry favor with someone more popular than them by going out of their way to praise that person (i.e. "suck-up" or "kiss-ass"). On social media, this can mean consistently liking someone's posts or pictures and mentioning them in their own posts. The term saw a spike in interest on social media after a meme calling NBA television personality Nick Wright a "dickrider" for posting so much about basketball player LeBron James went viral on Twitter in mid-May 2022.

Origin

The earliest known definition for "Dickrider" was submitted to Urban Dictionary on February 28th, 2003,^[1] by user Carla Alfaro, stating "someone who is a follower not a leader" (shown below, left). The most popular definition on Urban Dictionary was added on November 14th, 2011, and is closer to the way the term is used today. It was submitted by user LADY Inc and reads, "Dickriding is when someone overpraises another person with intentions to get noticed, or to get approval by that person. This person acts like a groupie in hopes of obtaining extra cool points with that person" (shown below, right).

Spread

While "dickrider" has been used to describe any form of sycophantic behavior on social media, it is most commonly used with regard to sports and rap music. For example, on June 27th, 2021, Twitter user @YoNipplesHairy^[4] used the term to insult podcaster @cuffsthelegend for saying people on NBA Twitter wanted to be like him (shown below, left). On December 27th that year, rapper DJ Akademiks^[5] then used the term to describe people who believed the "Jay Z rocafella rocnation" era of hip-hop was the genre's peak, gaining over 190 retweets and 800 likes in five months, as well as over 890 quote-tweets from people largely criticizing him as hypocritical for calling others "dickriders" (shown below, right).

On May 9th, 2022, Instagram meme page @cocksources^[2] posted an image calling NBA TV personality Nick Wright a "dickrider" for making over 68,724 tweets about Lebron James (which is not true), gaining 28 likes in one week. The following day, the image was reposted by Twitter user @mattinaq,^[3] gaining over 5,000 retweets and 45,000 likes also in one week (shown below). This led to a surge in jokes about the term on Twitter over the following days.

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References