Nut Stacking

Submission 5,824

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About

Nut Stacking is an activity and social game that involves carefully building a structure out of hexagonal nuts, such as a tower or a pyramid. In early May 2023, livestreams on TikTok in which users built structures out of the metal nuts to gather donations gained virality on the app.

Origin

Nut stacking (also known as Nutstacker) as a competitive activity was popularized by the game show Minute to Win It in which contestants partake in a series of 60-second challenges using household items. The challenge was originally featured on the series premiere of the show on March 14th, 2010 (seen below).^[1]

Starting in 2012, the YouTube game show channel Outscord uploaded several videos of Nutstacker. For example, a video of two contestants competing against each other uploaded^[2] on April 1st, 2014, received over 214,000 views in nine years (shown below, left).

Spread

Starting at least as early as November 2021, livestreams in which users stacked nuts gained initial popularity on the platform. On November 15th, Twitter^[3] user @AyeisforAnnie reported on the budding phenomenon in a tweet (shown below).^[3]

In June 2022, nut stacking streams by TikToker @idmtuincvlffe went viral on the app, with multiple users sharing^[4]^[5] clips from the streams and edits based on them (examples shown below, left and right).

Starting approximately in late April 2023, a trend in which users livestreamed nut stacking with the Crying Filter on while allowing viewers to remove nuts with live donations achieved popularity, with users @oneloker^[6] and @genius.god^[7] becoming the two most prominent TikTokers driving the trend.

The streams commonly allowed viewers to donate one Baseball Cap gift (worth approximately $1.30 USD) to remove one nut from the stack, while streamers pretended to be extremely distraught by the activity (example videos shown below).

On May 22nd, 2023, Twitter^[8] user @datbx_ tweeted a screenshot of a nut-stacking stream, commenting "people who make videos like this deserve a place worse than hell." The tweet (shown below) received over 740 retweets and 15,400 likes in one month.

In late May and early June, the discourse surrounding the nut stacking streams continued on Twitter and TikTok.