Drakeposting

Origin

Drakeposting is built from "Hotline Bling," a 2015 single by the Canadian rapper Drake. The song was released on July 31st, 2015, and the music video — Drake dancing alone inside a color-shifting cube — went up on Apple Music on October 19th of that year.

Drake makes several gestures in the video, and one of them, raising a hand beside his face with an expression of distaste, was clipped out into a reaction image. The earliest documented use is on 4chan's /v/ (video games) board, in a thread about first-person shooters posted on October 31st, 2015. The word "drakeposting" itself predates that: it appears as early as May 4th, 2015 in a /fit/ (fitness) thread about the artist.

Spread

The real spread happened inside 4chan in January 2016, and the board-by-board timing survives: /mu/ (music) on January 3rd, /int/ (international) on January 5th, /v/ on January 8th, /g/ (technology) on January 16th. Between January and March 2016 the term shows up in hundreds of independently archived threads — an unusually well-documented case of a format moving from one board across an entire site.

The template hardened during that stretch: a two-panel comparison with the rejecting, hand-raised frame and the disliked option on top, and the pointing, approving frame with the preferred option below. Stacking rejection over approval was not itself new — it continues a lineage of reaction images including Costanza.jpg — but the Drake version spread so much further that it became the definitive form of the structure.

Variations

The best-known derivative is the cat version. In December 2016 the Instagram user @yisucrist posted an image with a cat's head composited onto Drake's, drawing over 32,000 likes. That in turn spawned cat-preference variants — beds versus boxes — which crossed to Twitter and Reddit in February 2018 for another round of circulation.

The format has lasted because the structure is so plain. Anything can go in the two panels, and swapping the person for another character or an animal leaves the structure intact.