Upboat

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What Does Upboat Mean?

“Upboat” is a term that used to be popular on the social media platform Reddit to talk about the process of voting positively on user posts or comments. In fact, upboat is a slang synonym for upvote, the general process by which Reddit items rise and fall in site rankings.

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Techopedia Explains Upboat

The story behind upboat is that in the early days of Reddit, users noticed that because the B and G keyboard keys were near the V key, there was a tendency of users to jumble or substitute those letters. That led to upvote being rendered as “upbote” or “upgote.” Some caught onto this little glitch and started referring to upvoting as “upboating.” In this way, the slang term was born. It does not enjoy as much popular use now as it did in the early days of Reddit, but it has now become part of the Internet and computer slang lexicon.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.