Anger & Ragebaiting: What’s the Diff?

Let’s talk about anger.

It’s a feeling. We know that. But what is it?

Well, scientifically, it’s a kind of stress response in which you enter the “Fight” part of the “Fight or Flee” response. Your brain’s emotional center (That one crazy friend) starts grappling with your prefrontal cortex (Your responsible friend), fighting for control.

Often, seeing someone get angry can either cause you to feel provoked or scared, resulting in verbal or even physical confrontations. But what if you knew you couldn’t be hurt? What if you even found this outburst of emotion from someone else amusing? What if it gave you the modern world’s most prized treasure: dopamine?

Introducing ragebaiting! The internet’s newest and easiest way to flood your brain with even more happiness chemicals…and attention.

The name itself is pretty self-explanatory. It’s social manipulation dumbed down as much as possible. Almost always conducted online, ragebaiting comes in several different flavors and types. It’s conducted in multiple different corners by multiple different people.

Generally, the type of ragebaiting that you and I might see in places like commercial messaging apps (especially Discord) or in video game chats is simple–minded attacks to attract attention. This ragebaiting is where it’s at its lowest. You’ll mostly see someone be as rude as possible or show as much bad sportsmanship as possible in order to attract equally rude or angry responses.

This is evil, but it’s not especially dangerous. What is dangerous is how misinformation is spread.

I mentioned before that dopamine is the Internet’s prized treasure. It’s one of two things. Pleasure chemicals are right up there with money.

What if I told you that ragebaiting could bring you both of those things?

As of late, content creators have been using this tactic to gain social media clout. These could come in most forms of media: Videos, thumbnails, acting, you get the idea. It could be all sorts of things: a prank that seems just inappropriate enough, blatant lying, something controversial. Anything to get you to leave an angry comment?

The target could be anyone: Any person online is someone who could potentially get ragebaited. This, of course, is all in an effort to “feed the algorithm” and drive engagement, which could get you even more views and therefore more revenue. After all, any press is good press.

While I’ve just described the much more technical definition of ragebaiting, its usage is still different among teenagers today. Nowadays, ragebaiting falls among the ranks of similar terms like “gaslighting” or “love bombing,” two other types of manipulation tactics whose meanings have become much more loose in the hands of modern slang.

Generally, ragebaiting can be used to accurately describe anything meant to provoke a mainly negative response from you. If you’ve got an online presence anywhere, you might see a person trying to ragebait, spamming messages, making weird comments, etc. If you know what they’re trying to do, it’s kind of akin to seeing an animal going about their routine in a zoo enclosure.

If you come across a “ragebaiting attempt,” the best thing you can do is ignore it. Engage with it, and you’ll play right into someone’s hands. If it’s just a post that’s spouting lies, feel free to report it for misinformation as well.

There really isn’t much else to do unless you’d like to go through the effort of launching a multi-stage campaign against the concept, and even then, chances are that it wouldn’t do all that much. It would be like trying to protest against the lying. It’s really difficult to protest against a concept or widespread action.

If you’re chronically online, like the rest of us, then I recommend that you retain some of this information. Remember: Don’t engage with ragebait attempts, report any potentially dangerous misinformation, and most importantly of all…

Whoops. Looks like I accidentally left this article on a cliffhanger.

I hope no one gets too angry about that.