I keep seeing people call all sorts of things that absolutely should not be “rage” inducing rage bait and I’m confused how this term has evolved, what does it mean when something like a dumb question or a slightly censored meme is now “rage bait”? To me rage bait means something explicitly made to make you made, playing the devils advocate or purposefully edgy and polarizing content but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. To me it it feels like the way woke just means anything I don’t like, is the other side of the coin rage bait is also anything I don’t like I just don’t happen to be a conservative? Sorry if this post is rage bait, I’m genuinely asking and I have a touch of the ‘tism.

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

I don't think rage-bait is a thing. i think the people accusing others of posting "ragebait' are they, themselves the ones who are gaslamping us.

1. It induces rage in many people exposed to it
2. That was clearly intentional

See also: trolling, clickbait

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.

You're flagged as "Russian troll" so I call bullshit.

And why have you flagged me

All of Instagram.

I'm not sure, the tag system is basic and without context.

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.

Ok whatever. Jfyi, Russian state trolls never admit they are from Russia. So I'd recommend changing this label to something like "russian douchebag"

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

Like I saw a post with someone asking a stupid question about a fountain. I was like how is this rage inducing like, in any way to someone who called it rage bait then they said it was due to the comments, but like… that doesn’t make the post rage bait does it? How would you know the intent based off the original question/image/whatever? I understand comments are easy but I don’t get the completely generic stuff being called rage bait without context I guess?

Or posting someone else's serious-intended content to a wrong community for rage-induced engagement

Rage bait. Most of my comments and contributions on social media, including Lemmy.

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.

I don’t think gaslamping is a thing.

I think it’s being judged not by intent, but by the person’s own emotional response

People have the strangest emotional responses. Someone in a thread I posted recently said they were experiencing stress because there was a downvote on their comment.

Ikr. It could be called rage-mine for things that some people took offensively.

I think some of those cooking channels are more fetish content than rage bait. Like where the women are cooking but still have a bunch of rings on their hands and are getting super messy with the ingredients.

But yeah, similar to rage bait. Engagement is engagement.

Cue. C-U-E. The angry comments aren't lining up and waiting their turn. The angry comments are activated by the ragebait (like a stage cue).

Fair.

It definitely is, but I don't think I ever used that word?

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.

check your house for monoxide

You're always picking fights like this!

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.

Here is my interpretive dance..... Here fishy fishy... some like flashy, some like it dull...Some like it fast some like it slow. 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.