Pain Hub

About

Pain Hub, or Painhub, a parody of the website title Pornhub, is a popular online catchphrase denoting emotional pain or sadness, used most often in post-text, titles and as a reaction to or alongside sad, tragic or "painful" content, similar to the Pain format. It is also used ironically and to comedically exaggerate content as more "painful" than it is. The phrase first appeared online in 2017, gaining popularity over the next four years.

Origin

It is unknown who first used the term "pain hub." In 2017, Twitter page @painhub, now suspended, started posting "painful" content to their feed, gaining a considerable fanbase over the course of the year. On October 11th of that year, ME.ME^[1] collected a photoshopped "pain hub" logo parodying the Pornhub logo from an unknown source, offering the earliest known photoshop of the phrase into a graphic (shown below).

Spread

General Use

The phrase "pain hub" or "painhub" is used online in post-text and title-text as an alternative way of saying "pain" to accompany painful content. Examples of this can be seen regularly on Reddit.^[8][9] The phrase has also inspired numerous "pain hub" accounts, which post "painful" content meant to invoke sadness.

Painhub Shirt

On September 13th, 2019, Instagram^[4] user @pureindianbakchod posted an image of a sweating man with a defeated look on his face wearing a shirt reading "painhub" in the style of the Pornhub logo (shown below). The image is originally taken from a tweet by the now-removed Twitter user @90dayrefill. On September 18th, it was shared to /r/blursedimages,^[7] garnering over 2,800 upvotes in two years.

The image has since become one of the most popular associated with the phrase "painhub," and resulted in a number of image macros over the course of the next two years. For example, on April 15th, 2020, Instagram^[6] user @jokezar posted an image macro relating to the image, garnering over 64,000 likes in a year (shown below).

On November 14th, Facebook^[5] page Breathtaking Memes shared the original image with the caption, "Nobody: My Life:", garnering over 30,000 shares and 6,300 reactions in six months.

PainHub TikTok

On December 8th, 2020, TikTok^[2] page @https.www.painhub.com opened, as well as the related @PainHubTikTok Twitter^[3] page. The pages post "painhub" content meant to invoke sadness or feelings of emotional pain. The TikTok page often takes tweets from the Twitter page and superimposes them over sad graphics and songs for a depressing vibe (examples shown below, left and right).

The hashtag "#painhub" is also considerably popular on TikTok, with videos under it holding over 1 billion collective views as of May 2021. Typical content under the hashtag similarly denotes feelings of sadness and pain, as well as ironic depictions of it (popular examples shown below).

On April 3rd, 2021, TikTok page @boyz_pain_hub opened, posting painful content aimed at boys, amassing over 730,000 followers in a month (content examples shown below).

Various Examples

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Search Interest

External References