Neckbeard Nest

About

Neckbeard Nest is a slang term used to describe a messy and gross room that is still actively used for gaming or other types of stereotypically Neckbeard activities. Such images of these rooms often depict a messy floor with fast-food garbage, soda cans, food, dirty clothes and other clutter everywhere except for a singular chair and a clear line of sight to a TV or computer. The term began to rapidly gain virality in the late 2010s after certain neckbeard nests became captioned memes.

Origin

Pictures of desks, while often being incredibly messy, can notably be traced back to early 4chan and Reddit with some images of tables completely covered in ashes and various pieces of trash. One of the most infamous pictures of a messy desk was posted to the /r/wtf subreddit on July 14th, 2013, by Redditor ooMEAToo,^[1] picturing a desk covered in cigarette ashes, Powerade bottles and piss bottles, acting as a progenitor to the entire genre (shown below).

This along with other images like this, the commonality between such photos became the inspiration behind the subreddit /r/neckbeardnests,^[4] which was created by Redditor u/pearson530 on February 20th, 2014. As of April 2023, the subreddit has accumulated over 310,000 members.

Spread

The term associated with disgusting photos of such rooms continued to spread over the following years, eventually being used outside of Reddit where it predominantly existed.

On December 17th, 2019, Redditor ___okay^[2] would upload an image of a neckbeard nest actively in use, with four guys being in the messy room while playing Super Smash Brothers, causing many people to note the stereotype associated with Smash fans being perceived as correct, earning over 3,700 upvotes in three years (shown below).

This image would later resurface in early 2023, being used to describe crypto bros types, or generally boys with no real sense of what's going on in the world, as a sort of POV-lite meme. For example, on March 28th, 2023, Twitter user @goth600^[3] used it to have the men featured in the image talk about existential risk via a caption in their tweet, receiving over 140 likes in roughly a week (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References