What do you consider "rage bait"?
2026-07-13 03:59 UTC
Replies (14)
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@vivalapivo@lemmy.today 2026-07-13 04:39
I think it’s being judged not by intent, but by the person’s own emotional response and by the amount of emotional comments. Every emotion on the internet seems so fake today, so we flag everything
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@ivanafterall@lemmy.world 2026-07-13 04:45
I don’t think ragebait is a thing. I think the people accusing others of posting "ragebait’ are they, themselves the ones who are gaslamping us.
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@chaosCruiser@futurology.today 2026-07-13 04:47
It induces rage in many people That was clearly intentional See also: trolling, clickbait
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@mistermodal@lemmy.ml 2026-07-13 04:47
90% of these questions & 95% of the answers including this one
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@db2@lemmy.world 2026-07-13 05:03
Rage in that context doesn’t mean the full on definition, irritating or annoying are enough to qualify as the “rage” part of the term. It’s engagement bait with that as the method. The other part as someone else pointed out is the intent. The post you allude to qualified but you were reposting it without the intent, so while the meme itself is ragebait as the original creator had the intent it only applies to you by association not directly. Most readers won’t make the distinction without knowing that’s the case.
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@galbraith@lemmy.world 2026-07-13 05:11
All of Instagram.
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@raspirate@lemmy.world 2026-07-13 05:33
Any content that was produced with the primary intent of making people angry. Problem is that’s really hard to identify unless you know the original author’s intent. Just because it makes someone angry doesn’t necessarily mean it’s rage bait, but if it was explicitly made with that goal in mind, that’s what I would describe as rage bait.
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@Melobol@lemmy.ml 2026-07-13 06:17
Some terrible cooking channels on YouTube. There is no way anyone would cook like that. And they recorded it, edited and uploaded to the net. Pure rage bait
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@notsosure@sh.itjust.works 2026-07-13 08:50
Rage bait. Most of my comments and contributions on social media, including Lemmy.
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@Mothra@mander.xyz 2026-07-13 10:33
I consider rage bait anything that purposefully riles people up without any productive outcomes. Say, you can have a heated argument with someone because you have an interest in the topic and/or seeing other people’s points of view (even if you strongly disagree), but if your purpose is just for the sake of getting reactions, well, that’s ragebaiting. It overlaps with trolling, but trolling is more broad- you can troll to make people confused, shocked, to mock someone in particular, etc. Trolling includes also getting people into gotcha moments, engaging in a heated argument just to be annoying to one person in particular, trolls like to see people make fools out of themselves. Ragebaiting doesn’t necessarily have that, it’s more about getting the crowd to express their annoyance at something, not necessarily your actions.
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@ordnance_qf_17_pounder@reddthat.com 2026-07-13 11:54
Ragebait and engagement farming go hand in hand, the latter especially on the big social media platforms where the ragebaiter stands to gain monetarily with ad revenue. It’s usually some culture war shit like “WATCH: Woman thought she could attack man and he wouldn’t fight back”. Queue tons of angry comments and arguments. And clicks. Sweet sweet engagement. Other times it’s just obvious bad faith behaviour. Like going into a vegan community and saying “I think veganism is unhealthy and everyone should eat meat”.
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@dessalines@lemmy.ml 2026-07-13 22:13
Any negative speech: especially harsh, slanderous or divisive, that provokes equally charged emotional responses. One other thing I’d like to add: It’s not just that rage-inducing content is out there, that’s always been there. It’s that it gets rewarded by big tech, by making sure that highly responded content, gets pushed to the top. Capitalist tech companies have an incentive to platform this content because it increases the on-site time, and their own popularity, to the detriment of their users mental health. It also helps them push pro-capitalist narratives that atomize and isolate people who should be united by a shared humanity and class status. tbh we’re somewhat guilty of this in lemmy also, with the Active sort allowing new comments to bump posts to the top of feeds. The only real way to fight it, is to keep an eye out for these toxic / combative threads and posters, and remove them if necessary. Since we don’t capitalist incentives to keep people on site or serve ads, it serves no benefit to keep rage-bait posters around.
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@sunsofold@lemmy.zip 2026-07-14 23:28
Rage bait is anything utilising its wrongness for engagement farming. In an attention economy, engagement is rewarded, regardless of type, so one of the methods is just to ‘be wrong on the internet,’ and many people will latch onto it faster than a vacuum on your pecker.
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@pammyfromthesticks@mander.xyz 2026-07-15 00:09
Here is my interpretive dance… Here fishy fishy… some like flashy, some like it dull… some like contrast… some like it to flap at the top, some like it to drop. A bait is a bait… …I mean there is pleasure bait or some call it masturbate. Baits golore but marketing is marketing. The internet is the abyss in a world of covert advertisement and/or grooming messages hidden as culture. Anything can GO. To add, the whole infrastructure is a conformist scam. To unfuck the mind you gotta pull some rusty levers. Untie knots. Yet the game gets exposed… They have gotten hip to our game say those at the top. Every body and everyone is baiting. Too much pressure no sucker fish left in the hole. Yet the problems still remain and the arguing continues. Where what when… let time decide.