Rewritten from the ground up: Thu Feb 1 2001 at 20:49 utc
The less educated users of many BBSes and weblogs often compete to see who can post the first comment to a newly opened topic or story. These comments (called First Posts) are generally content-free and off-topic. They were once common on Segfault.org until Segfault shut down its comment boards; the first posters simply moved to the next weblog in line, and this was OSDN Slashdot.
Frankly, I don't see how a fellow would get gratification from such a practice, but I guess I'm just used to Usenet, Kuro5hin, Wikipedia, and Everything, where the users have much more control over new topics (called e2nodes here). If you want the First Post, write your own darn story.
First Posts in the Chatterbox after a server outage, however, are a different story entirely. For some reason, on nights I try for a First Post, conversation picks up more rapidly once somebody has broken the silence. This was common during the days before E2 had a hot backup, when it used to put up Word Galaxy during nightly scheduled downtime.