Huh?

A new trend in social media may have launched the first meme of the year

Let’s face it — the internet is getting worse. And nowhere is that more apparent than on social media. The modern digital landscape is dominated by warring platforms and constantly changing monetization schemes, leaving the average consumer with a daily scroll permeated by ads, slop, and the same six viral videos that have been circulating for years. During the early days of 2026, users on X popularized a word that encompasses why social media can feel just so annoying these days. It’s called vagueposting — and you’ll be seeing a lot more of it this year. 

Vagueposting is when people purposefully post or comment without any context, requiring people who want to know more to dig deeper or even outright ask what — or who — the post is about. According to Know Your Meme, the term vagueposting started with vaguebooking, a description for a purposefully inscrutable Facebook update that encourages friends to check in. The actual phrase vagueposting has been around since 2011, but internet users’ usage of it has recently skyrocketed. Zari Taylor, a digital culture fellow at New York University, describes vagueposting as using extremely ambiguous language for the sake of click bait or generating controversy. “It allows everyone who’s interacting with it to place their own definition or guesses on what the person’s talking about,” she tells Rolling Stone.

If it sounds familiar, it’s because it’s pretty close to a very common kind of context-less post, also known as the subtweet. While a subtweet and a vaguepost might look similar, the difference lies in the creator’s intent. Subtweeting is all about posting something shady and hoping you put just enough information to clue people in that you’re upset while maintaining plausible deniability. Most commonly people subtweet about people they know but also assume could stumble onto the post. It’s also used in fandom spaces, where people not only offer oblique language, but purposefully use asterisks to replace key vowels in identifying words, so the tweet won’t pop up in a general search. (If someone hated the new Hunger Games, for example, they might talk about it and type H***** G****.) But vagueposting relies on knowing how people react when they don’t understand something — and exploiting that. 

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The biggest conversations and usage of the term vagueposting are currently happening on X, where Elon Musk’s new monetization policies mean people are more incentivized than ever to post garbage and hope people ask what it’s about. In the past week, vagueposting has become less of a description and more of an accusation, with people on X using it the most in the comment sections of posts they don’t understand. But perhaps the best example of vagueposting hasn’t been on X at all. It’s actually a saga on TikTok that started with a single, vague comment and has since exploded into the first true meme of 2026. 

An aspiring content creator who goes by Abbie posted a video lip syncing to a Devil Wears Prada sound, telling her followers she was seriously thinking about her 2026 rebrand. But it was the comment section that got people’s attention. One commenter, from an account named Tamara, said her 2026 rebrand involved buying 365 buttons, one for every day, to help her be more conscious about the passage of time. But every follow up question from other commenters, like what the buttons were for, what she planned on doing with them, or even how they would help her think about the passage of time, seemed to frustrate the poster more and more. Eventually, she posted a reply, which has since gone viral: “Hey so it only has to make sense for me to do it and I don’t feel like explaining it to anyone else.” In the week since, the phrase has gone from a confusing exchange into the first viral meme of the year, with everyone from TikTok creators to PBS to the Empire State Building chiming in on the joke. If vagueposting is king right now, it owes a ton of its branding to Tamara. 

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It’s not a surprise that the first discourse of the year and the first meme both revolve around the same degradation of social media platforms. On its own, it’s a fairly innocuous — if somewhat annoying — type of content. But Taylor, who studies how the internet interacts with culture, says the rise of vagueposting coincides with a public discontent with just how grasping social media has become. It’s also not a coincidence that the 2025 Oxford Word of the Year was ragebait, another engagement tactic that uses human nature to get people to respond. The way that we post and interact with content has bled into our daily lives, language, and action. People can see the strings being pulled. They can see their apps getting worse, and they’re tired of it. 

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“We’re in a really critical, but also weird moment in social media, because everyone knows that everything is about making money, everything is an ad. Nothing feels genuine,” Taylor says. “Anyone is just throwing anything online and seeing if it will stick.”