About

Rage Bait or Ragebait, also known as Rage Baiting or Outrage Bait, is a slang term for content that is explicitly made for the purpose of causing anger in others online. Though it originally started as an offshoot of flaming and trolling, with the increased monetization of the internet and take culture, the practice of rage baiting has turned into a strategy for generating impressions through angering people into engagement. While similar to engagement bait, rage bait is specifically created to elicit visceral reactions from people to consequentially boost content or interest in something through outrage.

Origin

The act of purposely trying to make people mad existed before the internet and persisted into its infancy. In the 1990s, flamebait was a prevailing term, but it quickly fell out of style. Before Trollface existed in 2008 and before griefing helped create rage quitting, rage bait was the primary way that people would try to get others to be mad online.

One of the earliest examples is a post on YTMND by the user Vyldan^[1] that he titled "Downvote Bait." The sole purpose of the post, which was created on March 18th, 2006, was to use "Jack's Lament" from The Nightmare Before Christmas as the background music to mock a review he got saying that his post using Arial font was given a downvote simply for using Arial (shown below).

Rage bait continued to exist under the guise of other terms until December 20th, 2009, when Urban Dictionary user E. Nygma^[2] wrote the definition for it, stating that it is "saying something that will obviously piss someone off just to get the reaction," which closely aligns rage bait with other common forms of engagement bait and general acts of trolling (shown below).

Spread

In the mid-2010s rage bait was often used as a part of clickbait online in which the underlying idea was to do whatever it took to get as many views as possible, typically by evoking strong reactions toward content.

One component of clickbait, the YouTube Storytime Clickbait, would often have a video that involved raging or trying to get others angry so they would watch the video. On April 17th, 2017, Twitter user @GeneralAlpacaYT^[3] made a meme using that format and a Casey Neistat video about a woman screaming on a plane (shown below).

Rage bait became a prominent part of content creation and monetization in the late 2010s, with many content creators and outlets using it as a way to ensure clicks and impressions on content for the express purpose of ad revenue. Because of this, controversial or dissenting opinions posted online are sometimes pre-warned as not being rage bait, as seen in the video uploaded by Twitter user @JoeBuddenPod^[4] in which rage baiting is discussed as something that should be avoided (shown below).

Enough with the rage bait lists. #Complex releases their Top-50 Rappers out of New York🗽📌 Patreon Exclusive | “The Pressure” #JBP pic.twitter.com/CYO5qulQjv

— The JBP (@JoeBuddenPod) August 22, 2023

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References