We’re currently living in an era where our vocabularies are synonymous with ‘Michael Jordan is the GOAT’, ‘That’s moist uwu’, ‘Zaddy please!’, ‘no cap’, ‘sheesh’ and ‘oof’. In 2022, chances are that you must’ve heard these terms tossed around and merely assumed their meaning—until someone urged you to Google them.
Well, today we’re here to talk about one such word which has been part of our internet vocabulary toolkit for decades yet light years away from its intended meaning: ‘yeet’.
Where did yeet come from?
While most internet slangs bleed into mainstream usage from TikTok today, think ‘wadiyatalkinabeet’, the terms used in the early 2010s are usually traced back to viral Vines. In yeet’s case, it’s the early 2000’s hip hop culture. Yeet was actually a dance move, choreographed in a way that one would dip their shoulder in rhythmic steps while bending both their hands and knees.
Imagine riding a bike over speed bumps and tossing something to the side with both hands, alongside the yeet dubstep, and you probably won’t be too far off from the original dance. According to Know Your Meme, the choreography gripped the internet in February 2014—shortly after footage of people ‘yeeting’ were uploaded to both Vine and YouTube. While it’s hard to pinpoint the story behind the dance, Texas-based producer and video blogger Marquis Trill has credited @1ballout_, @Thefuhkinmann, @KronicCaviar, @AXXXXJXY, @JollyceM and @SmashBro_KB as yeet’s original creators. The earliest known video of someone grooving to the dance was additionally uploaded by YouTuber Milik Fullilove on 12 February 2014 with the caption “Fuck the nae nae we yeet’n.”
A month after the video hit YouTube, a Facebook page called Yeet Dance was launched—amassing 29,000 likes by the end of March 2014. In the same month, video blogger Trill graced YouTube with a step-by-step tutorial of the choreography. Heck, by the time August rolled around there was even a song dedicated to the dance called ‘YEET’ (who would have thought otherwise) by Quill featuring Showtime and Yung Cyph.
All of that said, however, yeet solidified its status in internet culture when the video of a young boy nicknamed “Lil Meatball” performing the dance at a school track was uploaded to Vine by Jasmine Nicole on 20 March 2014. Within two weeks, the post gathered over 122,000 revines and 104,000 likes. The video was then subjected to meme culture with hilarious remixes and Photoshopped edits.
How is yeet used?
Now, yeet has two main contexts: one is used in an (almost) nonsensical and humorous way—all the while backed by a solid meaning—while the other has to do with, well, the velocity of throwing things.
In the first case, yeet is an expressive word. An exclamation of excitement, approval, surprise or all-around energy, to be exact. The context here is the same way that someone would holler “boo-ya” after acing their exams or unboxing a $100 mystery box. It’s said smugly, but with a lightheartedness that cancels out the complacency. I mean, you’re technically shouting out a meme here.
In the second scenario, yeet has a more concrete definition. “To discard an item at a high velocity,” or “throwing something very very hard very very fast,” as the top entries on Urban Dictionary explain. Simply put, it means tossing an object with confidence and authority into something or away from the person throwing it in the first place. For example, if someone aims their empty soda can into a bin, they are ‘yeeting’ the object into the trash. Those familiar with the term will also probably shout “yeet” as they chuck the can into the bin.
It should be kept in mind that you can yeet yourself too. Let’s say you’re hungry, proceed to find a McDonald’s and practically hurl yourself into it. In this case, you’re actually ‘yeeting’ into McDonald’s. You can also choose to yeet newborn babies like a basketball into a hoop. Don’t ask me why, but that’s one of the major yeet memes the internet has birthed to date. The effectiveness of the word essentially rests on self-confidence, if you really think about it.
How to use yeet in 2022
Now onto the real deal: how can one still slip the word yeet into conversations in 2022 and stay relevant? For starters, it can basically be used to describe anything done with vigour and assertiveness. But remember to use the term in casual scenarios and not in a Google Meet attended from your work-from-home desk. Don’t go around saying “I’m going to yeet this project!” (read: “Woohoo! I’m going to nail this project” as a positive remark) Sure, it’s an exclamatory word used to express excitement and initiative, but reading the room is a prerequisite which comes with yeet.
Alternatively, the word can also be used to replace ‘sheesh’ to express annoyance or as a filler term in sentences when you don’t really know what to say. For example, “Donald Trump just said that global warming is good because it means more ‘seafront properties’.” “Yeeeet!” Okay, maybe in this context it could also mean he’s due to be yeeted from the country but you get the gist.
So what are you waiting for? Yeet yourself out there with your updated knowledge on internet terms and yeet everyone who believes the term is dead in 2022.
18 years ago, in the pre-smartphone and pre-YouTube days of the internet, a 15-year-old who went by SuperYoshi (real name Matt Mulligan) uploaded a video to the now-discontinued website called SheezyArt. Titled ‘The Adventures of Super Mario 3 Remixed’, the video was a pixelated edit of random clips from an episode of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!. Using Windows Movie Maker, the creator captured the essence of what meme culture has evolved into today: absurd, nonsensical, surreal and provocative media aimed to evoke humour, shock and confusion.
At the time SuperYoshi posted the edit, users on SheezyArt termed the genre ‘Poop’ and dubbed Yoshi “The Father of Poops.” The following year, when YouTube made its grand debut as an online video sharing and social media service, Poops infiltrated the platform and gripped the internet. During this shift, however, the genre was renamed to suit its native status on the platform.
Welcome to the wildly random world of YouTube Poop, an artform currently on the brink of extinction—yet still functioning as a ground zero for modern meme culture.
What is YouTube Poop?
YouTube Poop, often abbreviated as YTP, is a genre of video mashups created by remixing or editing existing media—including (but not exclusive to) clips from popular cartoons, TV shows and commercials. According to Wikipedia, the source material often carries cultural significance which is fragmented and appropriated into a new media for “humorous, satirical, obscene, profane, as well as annoying, confusing, or dramatic purposes.” Meanwhile, meme database Know Your Meme defines the goal of YouTube Poop to create “purposely annoying videos that delight those who make them and irritate those tricked into watching.”
Independent of the source material, however, specific editing techniques are what define YouTube Poop. Conveniently termed ‘Poopisms’, the methods include: reversals (for example, a person walking into a room can be edited to walk out), frame freezing (especially when an animated character makes a funny face mid-yawn), object duplication (in certain frames for comedic purposes), visual gags (quick flashes of other characters as a crossover edit) and bleeping, even for words that aren’t explicit. Stutter loops are also added for emphasis while sentence mixing—a technique where words are cut and mixed to create entirely new sentences that often include profanities—are used to make old cartoon characters address the latest news gripping the world. Earrape is another facet of YouTube Poop. Although undesirable, this is where creators intentionally blast the volume of certain frames to annoy viewers.
Now, all of this may seem overwhelming and hard to digest. But that’s exactly what YouTube Poop seeks to evoke: confusion and disorientation to the increasingly indifferent world of YouTube. If such edits were cross-posted to other platforms, say TikTok or Instagram, they’d fail to find their footing. Sure, short fragments of these edits have previously gone viral on the two platforms but it can’t be denied that YouTube has been conditioned for such edits in the first place.
Chronicles of a fallen art form
So what is it about glitchy repetitions and humorous juxtapositions that make YouTube Poop so appealing? What is the creative process like? And most importantly, how is the genre still influencing internet humour in 2022?
“I would define YouTube Poop as an edit of pre-existing media that has been heavily edited in a way to be confusing, edgy or funny—mostly the last one though,” said Payes, an enthusiast who has built a community of YouTube Poopers on Discord. Although Payes stumbled across the genre when he was much younger, he was hooked onto it after watching a series titled ‘Barney with Bad Words’ posted by the now-terminated YouTube channel Barney Pooper. Then came ‘Caillou’s Gay Halloween Sex Orgy’ from the notable YTP creator cs188.
According to Payes, the appeal of the genre lies in its editing tricks as well as in its ultimate goal to evoke humour. “It’s super funny to hear kid-friendly cartoon characters all of a sudden dropping the F-bomb, making sexual jokes or start talking backwards,” he told SCREENSHOT. As for NiceGuy, a member of the community Payes has built, YTPs are all about the randomness of the content offered. Discovering the genre in 2007, cs188 remains the top creator for the enthusiast.
Over at the backend of the phenomenon, I spoke to Shadowwolf1337, a creator who has been a huge fan of YTPs since 2009—now with his own YouTube channel amassing over 16,000 views on edits. “Technically, my very first YTP was made in March 2013 but it was some very shitty Asdfmovie6 and Asdfmovie4 Poops made with Windows Movie Maker,” he shared. Fast forward to late 2016, the creator edited his first “real” YTP where he used a bunch of songs from the 80s and had fun during the process. “I never really finished the edits and was afraid to upload it—given my great fear of YouTube’s copyright strike system,” he added.
YouTube’s copyright and fair use, how could I forget? Since YouTube Poop relies heavily on existing audiovisual material protected under copyright laws—and sometimes modified in ways which redefine the intended purpose of the material (be it for a good cause or bad)—the videos are often shot down from the platform following complaints filed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
In fact, back in 2007, political scientist and author Trajce Cvetkovski noted how the mass media conglomerate Viacom once filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube explicitly concerning YTPs. More specifically, a video titled ‘The Sky Had a Weegee’ by Hurricoaster, which featured scenes from SpongeBob SquarePants and ‘Weegee’, a satiric caricature based on Nintendo’s Luigi. However, the YTP is still up on the platform with a whopping 18 million views and multiple YouTubers reacting to it, even in 2022.
For Shadowwolf1337, the interest to post YTPs on its native platform stemmed from bingeing on several other collabs. “I wished I could host my own collab but the problem was that I didn’t have any videos on my channel. So I made some ‘finishing touches’ *laughs* to my existing video and finally uploaded it.” Surprisingly, his edit evaded YouTube’s terms for copyright. The next day, Shadowwolf1337 joined Payes’ Discord server and started working on the announced YTP.
In order to get more insights on the editing process, I asked Shadowwolf1337 about the tools he prefers for his videos. “Ever since ‘Succ at Subway’, I’ve used VEGAS Pro 14 for editing, GIMP for photos that I put into the videos and 4K Download for sourcing,” he shared. “My materials are also quite organised [see below]: ‘YTP stuff’ is for anything I would regularly use between videos, ‘Temp YTP’ for any one-time downloads that I’m unlikely to use again and ‘Video save’ has a subfolder called ‘YTP sources’.”
Talking about the pre-existing material, Shadowwolf1337 makes YTPs with random and underused sources rather than the mainstream SpongeBob SquarePants and Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog references. “Because with more commonly used sources, every joke I could possibly make has already been done,” he explained. Following this approach, Shadowwolf1337 is the very first creator who has edited a real YTP of Family Feud’s Richard Dawson.
However, last year, he hit a mental roadblock. “Over the course of 2020, it became harder for me to decide on the sources for every video I made. Until it got to the point where, in January 2021, I just couldn’t make any more YTPs,” Shadowwolf1337 admitted. “It wasn’t the lack of motivation but the lack of inspiration. I felt like making them but got no ideas at all.”
Although YouTube hasn’t removed any of his edits to date, two of Shadowwolf1337’s YTPs have been age-restricted. “These two videos just so happen to be the only ones with the F-word in the title,” the creator added. Let’s not forget how the explicit nature of YTPs often determines their appeal here. Furthermore, back in June 2021, Shadowwolf1337 lost his motivation to create YTP content altogether. “[This is] because of the epidemic of community guideline strikes and terminations that happened back then,” he said, outlining how tons of YouTube Poop creators have been discouraged and quit because of YouTube itself.
“Then we have those people who assume YTP is ‘just a dead trend from 2009’. Although I don’t think they have that much to do with it, I believe omitting ‘[YTP]’ from the title of a video results in more views.” The irony, right?
The legendary way forward
If all of this talk has prompted you to check out the genre, even though I’m pretty sure you must’ve stumbled upon a YTP before, here’s what all three enthusiasts have to say. “Just have a good laugh, that’s all I ask,” NiceGuy admitted. Meanwhile, Payes reminds one to be aware of the fact that there are different types of YTP creators with their own personal take on the genre. “Some are edgier than others but the best YTPers [according] to me are cs188, Marck3611, Hellion Hero, and The Septic Foundry,” he told me.
And if you’re interested in creating YTPs yourself, we’ve got Shadowwolf1337 on the line for some pointers. For starters, he preaches that people should spend more time with their sentence mixing. “I hate it when they slap roughly-cut clips of sound together and call it a day. With sentence mixing, you don’t just find a place where the vowel or consonant sound is said, you have to find a good place where it’s said—the strongest, clearest and the most well-defined sound that you can find.”
On the other hand, if you’re having a hard time discovering it, here’s a little hack from Shadowwolf1337’s experience: use a consonant sound that isn’t actually from the video. “I only put captions over parts of my sentence mixing that I find hardest to hear, but I don’t overuse them because having all the jokes read out to a person kind of ruins the humour,” he explained, highlighting how he often scraps loads of edits if they don’t turn out to be funny. “My quality control with uploading is that I find my edits funny, if not, [they have to include] original jokes or [be] cool to watch.” Payes additionally pointed out the overused trope of earrapes deployed to poke humour. “I don’t really find that funny… [it] can be painful to someone who is wearing headphones,” he concluded.
Even though YouTube itself is sabotaging its native video genre, the YTP community is committed to both expanding and reviving interests in the artform. In Payes’ Discord server, there are even dedicated channels for discussions, arts and self-promotions.
Think of it this way: YouTube Poop is being pulled off by creators with a computer and software skills. It is what punk music was to pop literate kids back in the 1970s—experimental and quite open-ended. Despite this low barrier of entry, however, the medium continues to influence modern meme culture with reaction GIFs and one-liners. And considering how there are YTPs being made on Disney’s Encanto as we speak, the genre is far from its supposedly ‘expired shelf life’.
