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Reddit is truly a fascinating corner of the Internet. A very substantial one, too, with Yahoo Finance reporting in February 2025 that it had 101.7 million active daily users as of the previous December. The key to this popularity is surely its broad appeal. Whether your interests lie in video games, photography, whittling, or anything else, you’ll usually find a community eagerly discussing the latest developments within it on Reddit. Often, you’ll plug a query into a search engine to find that, surprise, a Redditor has already asked it.

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A lot of the world’s active users surely fell into Reddit accidentally in this way. It can be quite the rabbit hole, and if you’re new to it, you may have found that it’s a world of abbreviations and shorthand. One such shortened form you’ll probably see in posts you interact with is “OP.” 

Context is crucial here, because in a discussion about a video game, one might refer to a particular character as OP, meaning overpowered. In terms of a more general Reddit discussion, however, it will be used to mean Original Poster – that is, the person who began the discussion with the first post. You’ll also see it used in other social media spaces, such as Instagram’s record-breaking Threads. We’ve already explained what GPT means in ChatGPT, and here’s the answer to another question you might have had.

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In online discussions, it usually isn’t long before several users arrive to throw in their two cents’ worth. Maybe they have good intentions of adding insight; maybe they disagree with something somebody else has contributed, and they’re going to make sure the person in question knows it. Whatever the reason, even the simplest question with a yes or no answer can quickly become a lengthy thread. In the melee, it can become difficult to tell who’s responding to who, and this is where “OP” comes in.

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You might see it frequently arise within posts. A Redditor might state, for instance, “I agree with OP,” “OP, that’s an awful idea,” or “OP should try doing such-and-such.” You might also see the letters “OP” next to a Redditor’s name when they post. This means, as you’ll now know, that this is a response from the original poster.

With internet discussion forums being just that, there will also be times when somebody will start a new Reddit post but will specify that they aren’t the OP, with “not OP” or similar. This seems like a contradiction, but the meaning in this case is that they’re sharing another post (via a screenshot or similar) that isn’t their own, thereby drawing attention to it without taking credit (or getting negative attention) for it. There things you should never share on social media, after all, even if sometimes we can’t resist.

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