Load-Bearing Posts

Submission 1,505

Part of a series on Discourse (Slang). [View Related Entries]

About

Load-Bearing Posts refers to a slang term for memes, tweets and other viral content that significantly altered internet discourse, trends, language and meme formats, ultimately supporting the breadth of internet culture like a building's "load-bearing wall" or "beam." Coined in mid-2024, a viral debate ensued on Twitter / X about what posts were load-bearing. Variant debates ensued after, like what posts were "not load-bearing" and instead only held significance in the personal lexicon.

Origin

On May 23rd, 2024, X^[1] user @Wangleberry tweeted, "What are the load-bearing posts of our time?" further namedropping memes like Dril's I Will Face God and Walk Backwards Into Hell tweet, Miette and Ed Balls as possible examples. Over two weeks, the tweet received roughly 240.6 million views and 23,000 likes (shown below).

Spread

The "load-bearing posts" tweet gained over 240 million views in two weeks due to viral quotes in which users shared their idea of a load-bearing post. For instance, the first viral quote was shared by X^[2] user @maxdubler on May 24th, 2024, who attached the "how many affordable housing units did the Burger King have?" tweet, receiving over 3,400 likes in 13 days (shown below, left).

On May 25th, X^[3] user @alistaircoleman added a quote, sharing the "being an adult means that every few days you must spend £30" tweet, receiving over 22,000 likes in 12 days (shown below, right).

Increasingly viral quotes surfaced on X^[4]^[5] going into late May 2024. In turn, tweets joking about the term surfaced, like one shared by X^[6] user @veryimportant on May 26th, 2024, reading, "There are no 'load bearing posts.' Each post is a burden on us all," gaining over 7,000 likes in 11 days (shown below, left).

On May 28th, X^[7] user @NotJosephGarcia tweeted about asking, "so what are the load bearing sentences of our conversation?" mid-conversation, earning over 2,200 likes in nine days (shown below, right).

Also in late May 2024, the "load-bearing post" tweets were screenshotted and reposted to Instagram^[8] and Facebook,^[9] among other platforms.

On May 31st, 2024, X^[10] user @bobsredmilf tweeted, "what are posts that aren’t load-bearing anywhere but your personal lexicon," gaining over 56.9 million views and 8,900 likes in six days (shown below).

The abovementioned tweet received its own slew of viral quotes and replies, like one shared by X^[11] user @megannn_lynne on June 5th, 2024, that showed a tweet reading, "I am Narcissus and my little zoom square is my lake," gaining over 96,000 likes in a day (shown below).