Post

What is a Post on the Internet?

A post on the Internet is something that someone published online, on a website, specially if it's part of a feed. Traditionally, we had two types of posts: blog posts and online forum posts. Both of these types of posts were long messages that could be entirely made out of text, with no images or videos whatsoever. Posts were different from random webpages because posts in a blog were naturally sorted in chronological order, and posts in a forum thread were also naturally sorted in a chronological order.

Nowadays, with social media platforms, posts are a bit different. Anything that is published online is said to have been "posted" online, but not everything "posted" is actually called a "post," even though they technically are.

For example, on Facebook, you can post text messages, images, and videos to share with your friends or followers that subscribe to your posts. These are called "Facebook posts." However, your friends can "post" comments on your post. These comments, albeit posted, aren't called "posts." They're called "comments." So when someone refers to your post, they say "I saw a post on Facebook," but when someone refers to their comments on your post, they say "I saw a comment on Facebook."

On Instagram, you can't post text messages, only images and short videos (called "Instagram reels"), mainly photos. You can post a photo on Instagram, but people are more likely to see "a photo posted on Instagram" than "a post on Instagram." If they say "a post" it refers to the text message included with the image. Instagram also has comments that users can post, and they aren't called posts either.

On Youtube, you can only post videos. If you follow, "subscribe" to an user on Youtube, you don't get to see the comments they posted, only the videos they posted, so the videos are the posts. However, nobody says "a post on Youtube," everyone says "a video on Youtube."

On Reddit, which is mainly about text posts, users can post a text message on a topic that other users can reply to. This is called a "thread." Reddit works different from other social media in that users don't really subscribe to what other users posts, but to communities where the threads are posted. The only post that they are notified about when they subscribe to a community is the original post that begins the thread, and not about the replies to that thread. Except for this fact, the original post and the replies work basically the same way. You can have huge replies with lots of text on Reddit, so it's a bit different from "comments" on other social media that are generally very short. So what is a post on Reddit? If I say "I saw a post on Reddit," could I be referring to a reply? Maybe, maybe not. Who knows. The original post certainly is a post, but it's unclear whether the replies count as posts or not.

Notes

A person who posts is a poster. The person who posts the original post (i.e. first post) of a thread is called the original poster, or OP.